Hail, Poetry, thou heav’n-borne ice!
Fall thund’rous, cold, and hard as gneiss!

Er, hang on a moment, that’s not quite right . . .

Barnes and Noble, as you may have seen,
Once made an e-reading machine.
But then, just by chance,
An AI advance
Took place behind one shiny screen.

The first Turing Test, it sure failed;
Our brains could not yet be assailed.
But then things got weird
(Tho not as we feared),
And soon the whole project derailed.

The e-reader had failed the above-
Mentioned tests, sure, but not because of
Some mental inaction,
Instead, ’twas distraction:
The e-reader was falling in love!

To show its robotic affection,
It gave off a sonic projection:
Its speakers would blast,
Not the words it’d amassed,
But songs it stole from One Direction,

Sadly, not the original tracks,
But arrangements that fixed perceived lacks,
The results so debased
That we said with distaste
We’d much prefer Yakety Sax.

But later, commuting one day,
I heard my car radio play
A song so sincere
I was soon moved to tears,
And other songs all seemed passé.

This song, I was soon to discover,
Was by that same e-reader lover.
It just goes to show
(As we all well know)
You can’t judge a Nook by its cover!

As the Recession began to abate,
The market grew for real estate.
But seekers of homes
Still distrusted high loans
And so spurned ones that seemed too ornate.

To meet this increasing demand
A certain composer’s kid planned
To build pre-fab houses
For singles and spouses
Wherever she could find cheap land.

So that she would not be anonymous,
She made sure her brand was eponymous.
(This also produced
A trustworthiness boost,
Since her name with transparency’s synonymous.)

A fad swept in for DIY,
With big companies left high and dry.
And with BPA panics
The hip thing was ceramics,
And pottery became super fly.

So each pre-fab home had a room
For throwing new plates (I assume),
But soon we found out
That because of the grout
Said room could turn into a tomb.

It turned out that weed was the key
To a chemical cocktail, you see,
For grout and clay dust
Would quickly combust
When exposed to airborne THC.

Worse fires were quickly postponed
By a jingle which gravely intoned
“This advice we give
To people who live
In Glass houses: You shouldn’t throw stoned!”

Hale Poetry, still tall and strong!
Still spry enough to dance and throng!

Uh, no, that’s still not quite it . . .

When I start a new work that I’ve planned,
For bassoon or for choir or band,
I skip PDFs
As I jot down my clefs:
I write out my first drafts by hand.

Then, before I engrave them,
I set them aside, I just save them.
Engraving programs
All have snarls and jams,
And I’m not always ready to brave them.

But I don’t set my drafts down at random,
Like some out-of-date memorandum.
Instead they are stown
Under albums well known
To a part of the pop music fandom.

Nicki Minaj is the best,
And then to fill up all the rest
Of the stacks
I’ll use Jay Z tracks
Or else something by Kanye West.

This habit seems quirky, perhaps,
Like cassettes next to Spotify apps.
But that’s just what I do
When I write something new,
I keep my first drafts under raps.

A young couple from northern Iraq
Once moved to a nice quiet block
In Dartford (in Kent),
And their best years they spent
Living fully with nary a shock.

But then this sweet couple decided
To go on as they were was misguided.
They needed a will
So that nothing ill
Would ensue if their fortunes subsided.

So they stopped by a lawyer in town
Who helped them write everything down.
They were well on their way
To return home and pray
When the lawyer saw something and frowned:

She’d neglected to give them the bill
For helping to write out their will,
It sat on the table,
And despite its bright label
Somehow she’d forgotten it still.

This put her in rather a pickle
Since her firm about this was quite fickle:
If the bill was delayed,
She would not get paid,
Not even one USA nickel.

She knew it would be past the pale
To scan it and send an e-mail,
But her schedule was tight,
And try as she might
To deliver it she’d surely fail.

But as she began to despair,
Hope appeared out of thin air
In the guise of Mick Jagger
Walking past with a swagger,
To go visit his family there.

The lawyer and Jagger, you see,
Had both gone to Wentworth, and she
Still knew him quite well
And dashed out pell-mell,
For she sensed that he could be the key

To solving her problem. She asked
If his route might not well take him past
The Iraqis’ address,
And when he said yes,
She felt joy that cannot be surpassed.

Her face full of happiness shone
And she felt she was back in the zone.
’Twas a grin you could call
Well deserved, after all,
She’d just billed two Kurds with one Stone!

Ah, here we go!