This isn't my femur

I like those moments when you're rummaging around and discover something that you've entirely forgotten: a book, a photo, a shirt, some text, a grandmother. I've just had one of those moments and discovered this poem, which -- I think -- I must have written. I found it in an email to myself. I must have written it at work and then sent it home. I quite like it, actually. One thing that is interesting is that, since I don't remember writing it, I don't have the usual "pride" or "ego" associated with it. It's just a text that happens (by default) to have my name on it as the author. I'm some kind of archaeologist. This isn't 'my' femur. I found it in a rock that I was dusting.


Northrop Frye wearing a banana and a loincloth

poked out of the bathtub and said

‘Metaphors are like you know

the banana peels of simile

waiting on the sideroad of sense for

Oh just any human being to walk along and take

the tarmac express to a crown

bump-bestowed and encircled by

excited little stars

which whiz as Plato whizzes

not one thing or another

& thumbing their bright grammar

at the squirt-flower of gravity and us’


* * *

I don't remember if I've mentioned this here about our school "house" system. Instead of Hufflepuff and Gryffindor, we have 4 girls' houses and four boys' houses. They are linked as brother and sister houses. I am in Maple house. Some years ago, in an attempt to create a house cheer, the other house masters and I were brainstorming. Maple? What rhymes with maple? V.S. Naipaul?

We (I? I don't remember) came up with this cheer:

Maple! Maple!
It almost rhymes with table.
Booyeah! (hand with closed fist, arm pulling down like sounding a truck horn.)
Arrrrgh! (biceps flex, hands at waist in front)


The boys in our house enthusiastically shout this out at the end of every house meeting and before house sports events.

It's quite wonderful, this surreal cheer being integrated into sports events, the irony flickering on and off as we use it to get pumped up and forgot how ridiculous it is, since it works.