I do write poetry. But I must admit, I am not a serious poet. I am a humorist at heart, so I tend to write only goofy non-serious poems like this one;
So here is a poem that rhymes but has too much “but-but-but” in it. A poem about pants should not have too many “buts” in it. One butt per pair, please. So this is an example of spectacularly bad poetry. Why do we need bad poetry? Because it’s funny. And it serves as a contrast to the best that poetry has to offer.
As a teacher I remember requiring students to memorize and recite Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken”. Now this sort of assignment is a rich source of humorous stories for another day. Kids struggle to memorize things. Kids hate to get up in front of the class and speak with everybody looking at them. You get a sort of ant-under-a- magnifying-glass-in-the-sun sort of effect. But in order to truly get the assignment right and get the A+, you have to make that poem your own. You have to live it, understand it, and when you reach that fork in the road in your own personal yellow wood, you have to understand what Frost was saying in that moment. That is the life experience poetry has a responsibility to give you.
Hopefully I gave that experience to at least a few of my students.
Bad poetry makes you more willing to twirl your fingers of understanding in the fine strands of good poetry’s hair. (Please excuse that horrible metaphor. I do write bad poetry, after all.)
But all poetry is the same thing. Poetry is “the shortest, clearest, best way to see and touch the honest bones of the universe through the use of words.” And I know that definition is really bad. But it wasn’t written on this planet. (Danged old Space Goons!) Still, knowing that poetry comes from such a fundamental place in your heart, you realize that even bad poetry has value. So, I will continue writing seriously bad poetry in the funniest way possible. And all of you real poets who happen to read this, take heart, I am making your poetry look better by comparison.
Catch a Falling Star 
When You Don’t Have Enough Color in Your Soul…
The world is not all black and white… at least, not since the late 1960s.
But many among us would rather have it that way. In fact, they think life would be simpler if white was always right and black was always wrong. The good guys wear white hats. The bad guys wear black. The good guys shoot the guns out of the villain’s hand. The villain ties the lady up on the railroad tracks, and then he explains in detail his evil plan, whilst the guy in the white hat unties the lady… or stops the train.
Then in the 1970s, everything started to be in living color on the television. Children and their teachers began to think the world was full of vivid color. Many shades of both the primary colors and the secondary colors differentiated red-headed Ronald MacDonald from blond Farrah Fawcett and blues-singing Diana Ross.
Luke Skywalker starts out Star Wars looking at the twin suns wearing white clothes, and Darth Vader wore only black. But the Storm Troopers all wore white and they shot poorly like bad guys while Luke was wearing black by the third movie and Darth Vader was saved from the Dark Side by the end of the trilogy.
It seems to me it is really up to us… each of us… to make our own color in life. We can limit ourselves to easy black-and-white living, or we can reach for the yellow stars, red hearts, green clovers, and blue horseshoes… if the Leprechaun doesn’t try to hoard the Lucky Charms for himself.
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