I admire poets, and as a young aspiring genius (before I entered humor rehab) I tried to write poetry. Somehow it all came out full of screaming many-fingered rain and tentacles of despair, along with other improbable appendages. I did have a limerick published in the International Review of Psychoanalysis (really!), but limericks are tavern songs, not poetry.

But I did write one poem that satisfied me, and of which I am still (justly, if I say so myself) proud. It has never appeared in print before now, but I present it to you herewith:

Pig pig pig pig
Piggy pig pig.
Pig pig piggy pig
Piggy piggy pig.

Piggy piggy pig piggy
Pig pig piggy pig
Piggy piggy piggy pig
Piggy piggy pig.

Okay, maybe it’s not “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,” but it carries you along. Sometimes I think it could be put in a more dramatic context; I like to picture Ben Kingsley reciting it on the battlefield instead of the band of brothers speech in Henry V. Or Elizabeth Taylor purring it as Maggie the cat. Or Lee J. Cobb raging it as Willy Loman. But it stands on its own, don’t you think?

Some of us may not be poets. And the world does need accountants. If I’m honest about it (which I have no intention to be), my attitude toward poetry in school was that the poet was trying to put one over on me. I remember my tenth grade English teacher waxing rhapsodic about Emily Dickinson and a phrase in one of her poems, “zero to the bone.” I thought it was a trick. If she wanted to say it was cold, why didn’t she say that? So I’ve always hated Emily Dickinson. No, it’s more than hate, it’s a thirst for revenge. She was trying to humiliate me.

I took a measure of comfort when I read something by Billy Collins in which he pointed out that all of Dickinson’s poems could be sung to the tune of “Yellow Rose of Texas.” So! The Belle of Amherst was really the Whore of Whouston! The Mad Maid of McAllen. The Witch of Waco. The Gallivanting Gal Pal of Galveston…

Okay, slow deep breaths, centering myself. That rush of excitement didn’t end up amounting to much, I admit; my revenge must wait another day. Maybe some future graduate student will discover that Dickinson used a nineteenth century prototype of Google Translator. She would plug in “You wouldn’t believe how cold it is” and out would pop “zero to the bone.”

Maybe I overreacted, just a little. Maybe it’s because she had the thing with feathers and I had the tentacles of despair. Maybe I would make a good accountant.

But I still like my pig poem.