Revenge of the Bad Poet

Eiku for Stella:

Stumblefooted goes the Rat;
Fat of thigh and arse-belarded
Stuffed with milk and bread.

Condescending alley king--?
Or vagrant rude, malingering?
Kick him in the head!

(She didn't much care for it, I'm afraid. Kicked me in the head, the little ingrate. That's what I get for trying to make her stand on my shoulder.)

I am not satisfied with the rhythm I've devised for the eiku: the first format was too loose, and this one is too restrictive. It invites bad rhymes, where no rhymes need be at all. I ought to just drop it--does the English-speaking world, after all, really want its own version of the haiku?--but I love a good word puzzle, and can't let it go.

"It should be about the words, themselves," I tell Stella, feeling idealistic. "You should read one of these things, and be all 'My, what a beautiful sound', before you even bother with the meaning."

Stella gives me a skeptical look. Giant rats are great at that--they spend most of their lives with their eyelids drug dragging at half-mast: "Uh-huh? Yeah? You looking at me? Man, you're useless. I haven't the time for your sort."

"I'm making a wordlist--" I tell her, putting my index fingers on the backs of her ears so she can't swivel them away. "--all words that sound good, regardless of meaning. Then, I'll see what they have in common, and build a structure you can hang them on. A structure for the right sort of word."

"You," says Stella, ducking out from under my fingers, "are way off in left field."

"Probably," I agree, grinning cheerfully. "--but wordlists are fun."

"I like to hear a three- or four-syllable word followed by a couple of shorter ones," I say, musing aloud. "'Marmalade time.' 'Retributive justice.' 'Moderation in all things.' I also like the reverse: 'Every afternoon.' 'My huge cricetid.' 'Great big bandicoots.' It gets clunky, though, if you do one right after the other. 'Marmalade time for great big bandicoots,' for instance, just sounds strange, like one of those stuck-together sayings you get on 'Wheel of Fortune'."

Stella rolls her eyes. (Will this never end?)

"I don't know what to do," I tell her. "I need a better poet, someone who lives for this sort of stuff. I mean, ask anyone what I live for, and they'll say 'practical jokes', or 'work', or something of that nature. Not 'words'."

Stella stares blankly. I lose all direction, and read over my wordlists a few times. I like words with repeating sounds, vowel or consonant, and dislike those squat-sounding words you get, the ones that hunch on the page like toads. I like words that spill easily into other words, without causing a gap in the sentence. Nothing, for instance, comes naturally after diarrhoea (aside, perhaps, from a bit of gas. Oh, man. I had to say it, didn't I?)

"I think," I tell Stella, in a sudden burst of inspiration, "the existing format would be fine, if I just stopped insisting on words of a particular length. All you'd have to do is use similar rhythms, and always have the stress in the same places."

Stella's eyes glaze over. I have succeeded in boring my rat to the verge of death.

"Foreign word for giant pouched rat," I quiz her, "thirteen letters?"

"Jättepåsråtta," she snarls, "quickly dwindling to minipåsråtta. Feed me!"

I feed my rat and go back to work, leaving the eiku alone. "The effort wasn't wasted," I tell myself. "I got to put Stella in her place, after all. And it was fun. Tomorrow, I'll write up those slime molds, like I've been planning."