In honor of Poem in Your Pocket Day

Adverbial Ketchup


Assemble some words, all your favorite words,
your biggest and best, most delicious of words;
Grind them with verb sauce, and odd punctuation,
Pepper with rhyme (to suit the occasion)
Then, if you will, some adjective yeast,
To bubble and build to a metaphor feast:
Rising unchecked o’er the brim of your brain,
spilling, and spreading, again and again--
poetry dough to be punched, to be kneaded,
to be stretched, to be strained, to be coaxed, to be wheedled,
and shaped at long last into poetry stuff,
some rich with thought and some with pure fluff,
but poems in makeable, bakeable form,
wrenched from the oven-- and read while still warm.

Mary McElveen
April 2010