But Not I

Can a man be a fraud?
Sure! When his honor's at stake,
not everyone measures up.

But not I

Can a man be a cheat?
Yeah! If profit's at stake,
we all want our share.

But not I

Can a man be a liar?
You bet! If a man's in a pinch,
he'll worm his way out.

But not I

Can a man be a sloth?
Oh yes! To choose play over work,
is what everyone does.

But not I

Can a man be complete?
Why not! It seems everyone has
a woman of their own.

but not i

Yes, I know, this is outdated. I do have a wonderful girlfriend now and I love her to death. Anyway, there was a point in time where I was rather down-trodden and a little lonesome. I am glad that has passed, and I'm glad I got at least this poem out of it. Hope you all enjoy! 

Signing off ~Sam Zimmerman

Robert Frost - Wind and Window Flower

Lovers, forget your love,
And list to the love of these,
She a window flower,
And he a winter breeze.

When the frosty window veil
Was melted down at noon,
And the caged yellow bird
Hung over her in tune,

He marked her through the pane,
He could not help but mark,
And only passed her by
To come again at dark.

He was a winter wind,
Concerned with ice and snow,
Dead weeds and unmated birds,
And little of love could know.

But he sighed upon the sill,
He gave the sash a shake,
As witness all within
Who lay that night awake.

Perchance he half prevailed
To win her for the flight
From the firelit looking-glass
And warm stove-window light.

But the flower leaned aside
And thought of naught to say,
And morning found the breeze
A hundred miles away.



Hi everyone! So today's little touch of love comes from the great Robert Frost (aptly named, as a lot of his poems had ice themes. Go figure). Frost has some of my favorite imagery, and he does so well personifying some rather obscure items; in this case wind and a potted plant. I'm pretty sure we're supposed to sympathize with the wind in this poem, rather than the plant. I'm not really sure, but the plant sounds really aloof. That might just be me though. This wind is looking in on her every night (wow, that came out really stalker-ish) and all she can do is sit there and think "wow, I'm a plant. Go me!" When she finally realizes that the wind wanted her, she falls over and pouts. Go figure. Anyway, moral of my story today: don't be a plant or the wind, they both suck.


Signing off ~Sam Zimmerman

The Poppy and the Pansy

Quiet, the Poppy walked into the room;
her sight so soft and delicately hued.
Silence hung in the air, fragrance imbued.
Chills spread, ripples of her softest perfume.

The tired old cantank'rous Cattle, whom
if he's observed is shown as coarse and lewd,
hides his face, and like all of those so shrewd,
appears to be a flower, full in bloom.

Now if this Bull was naught but coarsely grown
the Poppy must refuse the Bull's advance,
for if the Bull's allowed a second thought
the Pansy's love is caught twixt fought and flown.
And Poppy's life now ever shall be caught
in Cattle's hell, bereft of Pansy's chance.

So, I apologize for missing my post on Thursday, it was kind-of a hectic day and I didn't get time to post. This poem I decided to write after reading a novel about a woman with two suitors. The novel was all about the story from the woman's point of view, so I wanted to throw in a poem about the story from the suitor's perspective. In the novel the suitors didn't really have characters, they were more images or symbols than people, and I felt that rather unfair. Yes, I know, this usually occurs with the genders switched around, but it does happen this way so don't snark at me about it. 

I don't know how many of readers have experienced this situation in their life, but I have on multiple occasions. There are a few times where I've finally plucked up the courage to ask someone out, only to find that they're already taken. Once it happened before I actually asked her, but the other times I had have the awkward "Oh, well, I'm already taken" conversation. If you haven't already experienced this, I envy you and hope you never have to. Anyway, enough jibber-jabber for now. See you all tomorrow with another poem! Happy Saturday 

Signing off ~Sam Zimmerman

Emily Kagan Trenchard - In Which I Call Upon Tycho Brahe

In Which I Call Upon Tycho Brahe


Tell them about your pet moose
that got so drunk at your party it fell down the stairs
and broke it’s foreleg.
Tell them about the instruments.

Tell them about the nights you stood with chin
pointing to the heavens and lips quietly mouthing
the positions of the stars. Tell them the stars
are not just stars. The heavens, neither perfect nor immutable.

Tell them about your nose, sliced off in a duel,
and how you covered the windy hole in your face with a brass replica,
lashed it to your head with leather straps,
kept it and the twitching raw skin beneath well greased.

Tell them how you taught a generation to see. Tell them
two good eyes were all you needed to chart the heavens,
and for everything else, there was your psychic midget named Jep.
Tell them the answers are there, in the charts.

Tell them about the commoner you refused to actually marry,
though she gave you 8 children and wore the keys to your castle on her belt.
Tell them at their death stars, too, do not go quiet; they are as furious
and destructive as drunken men of means; they all fall in on themselves.

Tell them how you passed on those charts like Pandora. Like, what now?
Like the boy Kepler could be anything other than what history needed.
Tell them those ellipses were drawn from his gaping mouth.
Tell them you were for Kepler, as Kepler was for Galileo, and how

he cracked open the head of a God by smashing it against the sky.
Tell them how you loved a good party.
Tell them how the wild and ethereal world
is always in attendance.


Hello everyone! I figured as I've been doing some fairly heavy poetry recently, I'd do something a little more lighthearted today, and what's more lighthearted than picking on Tycho Brahe and everything that was wrong in his life. Brahe was kind of a mean person, especially his habit of getting in fights with anyone who disagreed with him, and his lack of ability to socialize beyond stargazing. As the poem says, he did have a lover who bore him eight children, though he would not marry her because she was a commoner. I just wanted to post something to brighten everyone's day, so have fun reading and go out and enjoy the brief moments it's not raining here in Rochester.

Signing off ~Sam Zimmerman

Dulce Et Decorum Est ~ Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.


This is another poem that I found thanks to a class, and I am quite thankful for that. Wilfred Owen was a sad story. He spent his early life in school to become a poet, and he met quite a few professionals who enjoyed his poetry. Unfortunately he was in college at just the wrong time to be drafted into WWI. He fought the war while still writing poetry and sending them back to his family, who compiled them into a book for him. He died in the war, one week before the armistice was signed. A large amount of his poetry gives vivid descriptions of the war and of the death and destruction therein. I won't write too much about this poem, as it does a fairly good job speaking for itself. I will say this though, if you can read this, and still feel that war is a good option, you should read it again, and again, and again. Read it so many times that you close your eyes and can see the frothing figure on the cart, writhing in agony, and slowly dying from the inside out. Then tell me war is a good option.

Signing off ~ Sam Zimmerman

Miss Emma's Dilemma; or A Trip Through the Mist

lord viper crawled on scaffles of scissors in
a copse of the firewood fern with fireflower fragrances
a blanketing blaze the
zen of the zacatecas purple light

a black star crashes the bad babysitter
ah-pen-yen aeon flux

the an gel a rome ah of at shit she

the rainbows and fireworks of the 4th
a RAMBO movie fickers in the red dirt
------r----a----z----e----d------
Miss+Emma_friend#Viking
ingredients:
                 Vitamin A
                 Vitamin K
                 Vitamin R

can you see the china girl chasing the tiger
its chinese red scales wasted
on those sixty-two untainted

ç®3@m 0ƒ †h3 Ç®0p.

HE gets shot with the silver bullet
the egg drains from his
Egyptian limbs

A wake-up call
emergency gun unavailable
HE is encased in embalming fluid

Nowhere to turn but to the sunshine
Elvis - guide me




Hi everyone! Well, Saturday is here again so I wanted to post one of my own poems again. As you have probably noticed, this one's a little weird. I wrote it as an attempt to see how bizarre I could make a poem while still having it make some semblance of sense (yay alliteration). I just re-counted and in the 27 lines of this poem, there are different 41 drug references. I'm not going to list them out, that would take a while, but basically if it sounds weird it's a drug reference, from the "bad babysitter" to the "emergency gun." The main story behind the poem was supposed to be that the speaker was experiencing a drug overdose, and no-one was able to save him. I hope you enjoyed it, see you tomorrow with another poem!


~Sam Zimmerman

ee cummings - little joe gould has lost his teeth and doesn't know where

little joe gould has lost his teeth and doesn't know where 

to find them(and found a secondhand set which click)little 

gould used to amputate his appetite with bad brittle 

candy but just(nude eel)now little joe lives on air 

Harvard Brevis Est for Handkerchief read Papernapkin no laundry 

bulls likes People preferring Negroes Indians Youse 

n.b. ye twang of little joe(yankee)gould irketh 

sundry who are trying to find their minds(but never had any to lose) 

and a myth is as good as a smile but little joe gould's quote oral 

history unquote might(publishers note)be entitled a wraith's 

progress or mainly awash while chiefly submerged or an amoral 

morality sort-of-aliveing by innumerable kind-of-deaths 

(Amérique Je T'Aime and it may be fun to be fooled 

but it's more fun to be more to be fun to be little joe gould)

Hi everyone, happy Thursday! I figured it was about time to break out the ee cummings. In order to really understand this poem, you need some background. Joe Gould was an actual person who graduated from Harvard, and the rest of his short life on the streets begging for money, claiming that he was writing an "oral history of our time" (mentioned as "little joe gould's quote oral \\ history unquote", but mostly he was drinking a lot and doing drugs. A lot of movies, novels and poems have been based on the story of Joe Gould (go figure, doesn't sound like that interesting of a story). 

Now that we have backstory, we can delve into the poem itself. The first two lines are meant to emulate the nursery rhyme of little bo peep ("little bo peep has lost her sheep and doesn't know where to find them"). A few other points probably need clarification to:

"nude eel" - supposed to sound like new deal

"Harvard Brevis Est" - Harvard is brief (in latin)

"a myth is as good as a smile" - plays on the phrase 'a miss is as good as a mile', but also insinuates that Gould was keeping secrets

"Amérique Je T'Aime" - "America I love you", a reference to a popular song at the time under the same name.

Now that we've got the verbiage out of the way, we can get into the meat of the poem. Most of what I got out of this poem is the college reference. "Harvard Brevis Est," our time as college students is brief, and when we get out, we better not end up like "little joe gould" who doesn't have teeth to his name. That's one of the reasons I went to RIT, to have a better chance to not be jobless. I also like the last line, which basically insinuates that it's much more fun to be the fooler than the fool. I hope you all end up liking this poem as much as me, even with the insane second stanza. Until I post again,

Signing off ~Sam Zimmerman

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner - Randall Jarrell

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Randall Jarrell - 1945


If anyone who was in AP Literature at NKHS is reading this, I hope you connected this to Catch-22 like I did. For those who haven't read it, Catch-22 features a character who was blown to pieces in the back of a plane (Snowden).

Back to the poem, it took me a while to actually figure out a lot of the double (quadruple?) meaning behind this poem the first time I read it. The four interpretations I got out of it were as follows:

1: Man's mother dies, he enlists in the army, he's in a battle in a plane and gets shot

2: The "mother" is the main part of the plane, and he was forced into the turret where he was shot

3: Mother dies at childbirth and man gets sent to an orphanage. From there his life is completely controlled by the state, where he spends his meaningless life until he dies.

4: The entire poem is about his birth, where "mother's sleep" is conception, "woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters" is the chaos of the real world, and (he might have died in birth, or his birth was his death) he was forced out with a steam hose (a common practice in 1945).

All of these interpretations feature one thing, this man's life was meaningless. He did nothing of importance; knew no-one of importance. No-one cared about him when he died. Even the brevity of the poem suggests the fact that he was unimportant, only worthy of five measly lines. Even through his unimportance however, we still feel sorry for his death. I think that Jarrell was trying to imply that even the most worthless people should be missed and should not be forgotten, although many are.

T.S. Eliot - Rhapsody on a Windy Night

RHAPSODY ON A WINDY NIGHT

by: T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Twelve o'clock.

Along the reaches of the street

Held in a lunar synthesis,

Whispering lunar incantations

Dissolve the floors of memory

And all its clear relations,

Its divisions and precisions,

Every street lamp that I pass

Beats like a fatalistic drum,

And through the spaces of the dark

Midnight shakes the memory

As a madman shakes a dead geranium. 

Half-past one,

The street lamp sputtered,

The street lamp muttered,

The street lamp said, "Regard that woman

Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door

Which opens on her like a grin.

You see the border of her dress

Is torn and stained with sand,

And you see the corner of her eye

Twists like a crooked pin." 

The memory throws up high and dry

A crowd of twisted things;

A twisted branch upon the beach

Eaten smooth, and polished

As if the world gave up

The secret of its skeleton,

Stiff and white.

A broken spring in a factory yard,

Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left

Hard and curled and ready to snap. 

Half-past two,

The street lamp said,

"Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,

Slips out its tongue

And devours a morsel of rancid butter."

So the hand of a child, automatic,

Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.

I could see nothing behind that child's eye.

I have seen eyes in the street

Trying to peer through lighted shutters,

And a crab one afternoon in a pool,

An old crab with barnacles on his back,

Gripped the end of a stick which I held him. 

Half-past three,

The lamp sputtered,

The lamp muttered in the dark. 

The lamp hummed:

"Regard the moon,

La lune ne garde aucune rancune,

She winks a feeble eye,

She smiles into corners.

She smoothes the hair of the grass.

The moon has lost her memory.

A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,

Her hand twists a paper rose,

That smells of dust and old Cologne,

She is alone

With all the old nocturnal smells

That cross and cross across her brain."

The reminiscence comes

Of sunless dry geraniums

And dust in crevices,

Smells of chestnuts in the streets,

And female smells in shuttered rooms,

And cigarettes in corridors

And cocktail smells in bars.

The lamp said,

"Four o'clock,

Here is the number on the door.

Memory!

You have the key,

The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,

Mount.

The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,

Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life." 

The last twist of the knife.

Happy Sunday everyone! Just thought I'd ruin everyone's day with a poem about utter isolationism. Not really, it's just a good poem. As I mentioned, this poem talks a lot about isolation and a lack of communication. If we look at the poem, there are only a few spoken words, and those are said by a lamp-post. He only has one toothbrush, indicating that he lives alone. The closest he can get to another human being is a prostitute who can't even step out of the doorway to entice him in. The closest he can get to another living thing is to have a crusty old crab grab onto a stick. Most of the imagery in this poem has nothing to do with communication. All of the imagery is either visual or nasal, no sound, no touch (no taste either, but that's not really that important).

There are also a lot of symbols that indicate a sense of distance. Prostitutes are people's excuses for relationships, but there's no real connection. Crabs are crusty, hard-skinned loners who don't connect with others. The moon, used a lot in this poem, is bright, but cold. The moon will watch you with her "feeble eye," but "She is alone." The isolationism is overwhelming and depressing. 

I don't really have any personal connections with the thematics of this story, so I really don't have much to talk about on that end. I do have some experiences with walking around at night, and much of the moon imagery draws me back to those times. I also love this poem for the almost lyrical nature, it flows so well off the tongue and it's just beautiful to read, independent of the message. 

Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed it, and thought it as beautiful as I did.

Signing off ~Sam Zimmerman

The Tree

O tree, thou art so kind
to shelter us always in our times of need
to hold in your broad boughs welcome and solace
for the weak and wan and lonesome.

Thou art so reliable, never waining, never wanting,
so true to the steady march of time.
Bud, blossom, bloom and die, a clock of years
for the weak and wan and lonesome.

Thou provides't what is needed,
always more, never less.
Play for child, food for all, and comfort
for the weak and wan and lonesome.

Thine companionship heightens all,
your lithe branches embrace the embattled soul,
an audience for the troubles and hurts,
of the weak and wan and lonesome.

O tree, you give me hope.
you provide stability in an unstable world.
You listen to our problems, feel the wants and needs,
of the weak and wan and lonesome.

Carry on brave companion
for you walk among giants, where few will dare tread.
If any man or woman could share your gifts,
to not be weak or wan or lonesome.

But none do share your heavenly gifts
all see but their own black hearts and rotted minds
carefully carving their own dark glob of worldly fame
unable to see the forest for the tree
but unable to see the tree for the wood
for these men and women are our idols
the focus of our satanic worship
the black succubi who carry us from our beds
to exploit our darkest secrets and desires
they reject the righteous for the easy
and the powerful for the simple
they coddle the slow and weigh down the fast
for equality ensures their power
and none will see their errors
for the lamb suit is impenetrable
while the wolf's greedy eyes still shine through
but if one man woman or child
could pull
                one
                      small
                              thread
the suit comes off
but then what is that man woman or child
but the next wolf.

Oh, if I were a tree, able to live my life
unencumbered by these horrors and wants.
But to leave them, leaves society, leaves a man
to be weak, and wan, and lonesome.

So, as it is now the first weekend, I figured it was about time to post one of my own poems. This one was part of a collection I did as part of my not-really-kind-of creative writing class last year. A little more explanation on that is probably needed. Last year, I did not have enough room in my schedule to take creative writing, so I decided instead to do all of the assignments for the class and submit them as an anonymous student. The teacher was fairly confused for the entirety of the course, and the last day I went and submitted my final assignment in person and told him that I was the one submitting the assignments. I think he was amused, but I'm not really sure. Either way, this is one of the assignments that I turned in for a freeform poem, so enjoy! Please criticize, I want to get better and I won't without knowing what's wrong and what's right. Thanks! 

Signing off ~Sam Zimmerman

Sylvia Plath - Daddy

Daddy

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe 

In which I have lived like a foot 

For thirty years, poor and white, 

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. 

Daddy, I have had to kill you. 

You died before I had time-- 

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, 

Ghastly statue with one gray toe 

Big as a Frisco seal 

And a head in the freakish Atlantic 

Where it pours bean green over blue 

In the waters off beautiful Nauset. 

I used to pray to recover you. 

Ach, du. 

In the German tongue, in the Polish town 

Scraped flat by the roller 

Of wars, wars, wars. 

But the name of the town is common. 

My Polack friend 

Says there are a dozen or two. 

So I never could tell where you 

Put your foot, your root, 

I never could talk to you. 

The tongue stuck in my jaw. 

It stuck in a barb wire snare. 

Ich, ich, ich, ich, 

I could hardly speak. 

I thought every German was you. 

And the language obscene 

An engine, an engine 

Chuffing me off like a Jew. 

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. 

I began to talk like a Jew. 

I think I may well be a Jew. 

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna 

Are not very pure or true. 

With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck 

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack 

I may be a bit of a Jew. 

I have always been scared of you, 

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. 

And your neat mustache 

And your Aryan eye, bright blue. 

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-- 

Not God but a swastika 

So black no sky could squeak through. 

Every woman adores a Fascist, 

The boot in the face, the brute 

Brute heart of a brute like you. 

You stand at the blackboard, daddy, 

In the picture I have of you, 

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot 

But no less a devil for that, no not 

Any less the black man who 

Bit my pretty red heart in two. 

I was ten when they buried you. 

At twenty I tried to die 

And get back, back, back to you. 

I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack, 

And they stuck me together with glue. 

And then I knew what to do. 

I made a model of you, 

A man in black with a Meinkampf look 

And a love of the rack and the screw. 

And I said I do, I do. 

So daddy, I'm finally through. 

The black telephone's off at the root, 

The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two-- 

The vampire who said he was you 

And drank my blood for a year, 

Seven years, if you want to know. 

Daddy, you can lie back now. 

There's a stake in your fat black heart 

And the villagers never liked you. 

They are dancing and stamping on you. 

They always knew it was you. 

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.


From The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath, Harper & Row 1981


So this poem has to be one of my favorite poems by Sylvia Plath. I know it seems creepy and almost masochistic, but hidden deep in the dark prose is a little bead of hope. Much of this poem is about the way the speaker's father was abusive, so she created herself "a model of you" and "said I do, I do." In essence, her father was abusive, so she found herself an abusive husband. The little grain of hope comes from the end, with the line "I'm finally through." This point turns the abuse from the present to the past, and makes it seem that she has broken off her relationship with this abusive husband. She also seems happy about it, acknowledging that "Daddy, you can lie back now," indicating that her father no longer controls her life. I think anyone who finds themselves in an abusive relationship can take solace in this poem, realizing that other people have been in the same situation, and perhaps for the same reason. These people were also able to find a way out of these relationships, so it is not a fruitless endeavor to work to better your life. Take heart, ye emburdoned friends, and carry thyselves to new and magnificent heights! (I have no idea why I decided to wax into Olde English, but it somehow fit the mood. I'm also writing this while listening to the Lord of the Rings soundtrack, so that might have something to do with it.)

Anyway, another lesson I like to take from this poem is that even from the darkest things, we can still take something positive. This is an exceptionally dark poem; even so, it has a positive outlook in the end where people are able to better themselves, no matter the situation. I feel like this is a good way of thinking about things, no matter the situation. I hope all of you enjoy the rest of this wonderful Thursday and the rest of Poetry Month!

Signing off ~Sam Zimmerman

Galway Kinnell; After Making Love We Hear Footsteps

After Making Love We Hear Footsteps

For I can snore like a bullhorn 

or play loud music 

or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman

and Fergus will only sink deeper 

into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash, 

but let there be that heavy breathing 

or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house 

and he will wrench himself awake 

and make for it on the run—as now, we lie together, 

after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies, 

familiar touch of the long-married, 

and he appears—in his baseball pajamas, it happens, 

the neck opening so small he has to screw them on— 

and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep, 

his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child. 

In the half darkness we look at each other 

and smile 

and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body— 

this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making, 

sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake, 

this blessing love gives again into our arms

from A New Selected Poems by Galway Kinnell, Houghton Mifflin, 2000

If anyone wants to hear it read aloud by Mr. Kinnell, go here

I just want to start off my saying happy birthday to my mom, and to apologize if I ever did this as a child. I personally love how much is crammed into this little poem, the imagery, and emotion. This poem wasn't written in 2000, it was written in the mid-1970s. Kinnell himself was a strong political and civil rights activist, as well as a globetrotter and appreciator of music. Many of his books, notably The Book of Nightmares (1971), are extremely politically relevant and focus deeply on the problems of the time. This poem holds little of the political nature of his other work. 

The most vivid part of this poem is the imagery. Not only the sexual imagery, but the imagery of the little six year old in the pajamas that are too small for him. I am currently young enough to remember a pair of pajamas that I had to wrestle over my head every time I put them on. But I loved them, so I kept wearing them until they became so threadbare that they were little more than rags of fuzz. That youthful exuberance and naivety tend toward the caring and maternal/paternal nature of the reader, rather than making us feel annoyed or angry (as most people would after being interrupted in this position). 

The other major point in this poem is the humor. It is supposed to be funny, with all the sarcasm and bantering. He qualifies sober with "reasonably," what is reasonable for an irishman? Probably not very sober at all. The sarcasm of "and he will wrench himself awake" resounds cleanly with the reader's sense of humor. Even the title, with its almost scandalous nature, provides some humor after we realize that the footsteps belong to a six year old. I personally thought it was going to be a cuckolded husband or something. Boy was I wrong.

There are a few key spots in the poem that I want to point out. 

First: "familiar touch of the long-married"

This line shows something very deep about this poem. Not only is this couple together and has a child, they have been married a long time, and still love and care for each other deeply. Not only do they not get disgruntled by their 6 year old (yes I looked that up) climbing into bed with them, it only serves to strengthen their relation as husband and wife.

Second: "and smile"

BAM! complete turnaround. The first part of the poem seems annoyed but understanding, with "but let there be... and he will wrench himself awake." This smile radiates the love that these two people share for each other, and it is because of this child and his childish ways that they are able to fell that so strongly at this moment. 

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this poem as much as I did, and I will see all of you again on THURSDAY!

Happy Poetry Month!

Signing off  ~Sam Zimmerman