The POTW: Verse Til It Hurts

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POTW #737
(Week of 12 September, 2010)
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The question I asked my wife this morning was, "What would you think the word 'jute' meant, if you didn't already know what it meant?" She decided it was a verb, as in, "I'm going to jute these potatoes." My own feeling was that it was a job, like key grip or secret shopper. I was working as a jute at the lumber mill.... Inevitably, there became a poem, founded on the idea that lots of words sound like they ought to mean something different, especially if they are in new context and/or you didn't know what they were supposed to mean to begin with. I'd supply a list of definitions for the more obscure ones, except that it wouldn't do you any good.

The Expectorant Jute

A mendicant formicary firm
Employed a transom jute
For a corollary two-week term
He was to lignify impute

The secretist was a dactyl girl
A fulminous glossary cuticle
She parreled the jute's impartible burl
A paradoxical pharmaceutical

As gibbous as a cubit boy
Tertiary, yet cajole
He asked her for her hoi polloi
They trammeled a dross on the droll

He was digastric, eugenically jitney
Limpet and disbursive
She was dowager than he
Stammel, yurt and cursive

It seemed as though the alluvial pair
Would never malinger ligation
But then they truncheoned laissez faire
And all was brin and ablation

Copyright © 2010 by Dave Grossman

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