We do a lot of poetry writing while I baby-sit at a small group we both go to every week, and I guess we were bored and we wanted to keep on writing wonderful poems just like Bacon. First we had to think of a topic though. I'm sure we just started thinking up a bunch of weird random topics until possums came up. At first we just started writing the poem like Bacon. We made a bunch of rhymes related to possums that didn't fit together in any way at all. So we did that for a while until we had maybe ten lines or so. Then the next day I did something I'll never understand. I just decided to finish the poem without Andrew! How freaky is that! I guess we hadn't been writing together that long and I just wasn't used to it or something, because now I never write our poems without him there. Well, except that one time. Anyway, I wanted to make the poem more like some sort of story so I put in all that stuff about meeting the possum and him telling me a story. Once the possum got the story going, then I put in the rhymes Andrew and I thought up because they didn't need to fit together too much as long as they were about possums. Just so you know, Andrew's the one who thought up the brilliantly clever rhyme "When us possums chew on a blossom, it makes us really want to toss 'em." Actually he thought up "There's a possum on that blossom and I really wanna toss him" but it's pretty much the same thing, right?
Larry
the Possum
By Jonathan Charlton and Andrew Saah
November 11-12, 1998
I slunk to a swamp
And I heard a chomp
And when I turned around,
A possum I found
So sleek and so hairy,
This one was named Larry
I asked him to tell me what possums
are like
And tell me he did, with much delight
His voice was raspy like when people
choke
And this is what he said when he spoke
Us possums are flabby
And we're rather shabby
When we wake up early we're pretty
crabby
Sometimes for dinner we scarf on rabbits
It's one of our most disgusting habits
Yesterday I saw one burning
It really got my tummy churning
Once one fell straight off a cliff
When we die we get all stiff
When us possums chew on a blossom
It makes us really want to toss 'em
When we play dead we don't seem alright
So when we get up we give quite the
fright
Our heads are small with squinting
eyes
When we jump in your path we give
a surprise
Our tails are long and very twitchy
They help to scratch us when we're
itchy
Our ears are sharp, as are our nails
If we cut you, you'd surely wail
We're very clever, if you only knew
You'd wish you were as clever too
And so my friend Larry ended his tale
At describing possums he did not fail
I thanked him much and left real quick
That thing about rabbits made me sick
(c)1998 by Jonathan Charlton and Andrew Saah