Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

In the Beginning was the Word

What do you get, when you kiss a girl
You get enough germs to catch pneumonia
After you do she’ll never phone you,
I’ll never fall in love again,
No, I’ll never fall in love again.

The songwriter who rhymed “Pneumonia” and “Phone You” was one inspired poet. I love those lines and they often find their way into mind when I’m working on other things. I told Linda I thought the song was from a musical but she said it was a Burt Bacharach tune. Neither of us can pin it down but we both liked it.

I used to write more poetry than I do now. There is nothing to compare with a poem that comes together and the lines start to resonate. In Shakespeare’s day some people bought tickets (cheap seats) to stand in the courtyard and listen to the actors. They couldn’t even see the stage. I suppose it’s analogous to tailgaters going to the stadium and doing to the game in the parking lot. If this is an analogy it's an imperfect one. Shakespeare wrote much of his theater in iambic pentameter. The lines in addition to being well written had a lyrical quality that has never been matched since.

My brother introduced me to poetry. He had some black-market dirty literature that included nasty poems and material laden with sexual innuendo. It was really raw and raunchy stuff but we had a good time with it… Reading those poems filled with racial, homosexual, and outrageous excesses of heterosexual behavior was so shockingly bizarre that it evoked a hysterical... almost nervous sense of humor. Oh my goodness I often thought, if Mom caught me reading this stuff there would be hell to pay. Still my mind soaked it up like a sponge and I could (and still can) recite much of the material if I put my mind to it. Fortunately, what amused me as a young boy were not the same things I find humorous as an adult, but I still think back on those poems and purple literature and chuckle sometimes, recalling the effect it once had on my seedy young mind.

As time went on my tastes moved on to more sophisticated and politically correct material… Rudyard Kipling and his Barrack Room Ballads were soon etched into my memory. Sometimes when I get in my cups, someone will ask me to recite some of those poems, Gunga-Din, Mandalay and Old Snarly-owe are some of my all time favorites.

In the military I used to do The Night Before Christmas at our annual Christmas parties where the youngsters were present. There is magic in that poem and it isn’t just the kids whose eyes get wide, hearing it spoken. That was the magic of Shakespeare’s theater, when the spoken word eclipsed the eye and listeners listened in awestruck wonder.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the ear is often capable of transcending the eye. After all, in the beginning was the word…