Haiku (is for) for thumbsuckers

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

Big eyes
Chubby thighs
Cute as a spoon
Carol Boone

The above little mind spill was my first and only critically acclaimed poem (if you consider scribbling on a 6th grade blackboard a literary forum, and being suspended from school the first week back from summer vacation, critical). I quickly chalked the ditty while ninety-and-eight of my classmates went scrambling into the cafeteria for their lunchtime milk and porridge, those teeming, hopeless non-romantics. The unenlightened are so…well, sixth grade.

The words popped into my head like a thumb snap and I felt at once, an uncontainable resolve to share with the world, my self-proclaimed perfect rhyme. She was the most social of all the pre-teen butterflies that term and had, with near lightspeed and between Harvest moons almost, evolved from her caterpillar larval state into the colorful and elusive Carolboonemus Papillionus. I hated her. I loved her. I would eventually do the elementary school equivilant of hard time because of her.

Actually, it was the cigarettes in my knapsack that got me sent away that day but the poem on the chalkboard didn’t help–the Administration wasn’t thrilled with the word thighs, or that I noticed they were in fact, a little chubby, or that I erased the first two (pretty important, apparently) letters of Pythagorean’s Theorem from the afternoon lesson of a higher grade.  And thinking about it now, it’s probably the only reason I even remember that darn postulate with all those right angles and square roots at all.

It was pretty clear from that juncture foward in life that I would never really be corporate (or political) material, no matter well I cleaned up.  My record was blighted early on. Perhaps I should have just begun working on my real estate career right then and there (it was after all, one of the easier tests I’ve ever taken). That, or started honing my free lance jingle writing chops for the likes of Leo Burnett, et al. Either way, one thing would soon become evident to this perennial independent contractor; no matter which way I turned in life, there stood I…straddling that always present line that was drawn by someone else–real, imaginary, or otherwise.

Let me point out that in the vast universe of the written word, Haiku (5-7-5, so what?), limericks and elementary school poetry rank only slightly above the Nursery Rhyme. Maybe below. You can argue if you wish but I stand pretty firm on this point. You Tube, in my opinion, also has to hover somewhere between home video and cable access TV within its own digital medium–completely self-serving and generally not nearly as entertaining as say, Two And A Half Men or The Weather Channel. Reconsidering, I wrote my ‘chubby thighs’ piece because a) I had my own boy meets girl agenda and b) I knew it would crack up my peers. Granted, I shouldn’t have been smoking at such an early age but let’s face it, I was headed for trouble anyway.

I’m not so sure how offensive the controversial video we’ve all been circling around this week really is. On its own it’s a pretty benign little ditty, not unlike my above mentioned ode to Carol Boone (who I did run into at my 30th class reunion, btw. Let me just say that the metamorphasis continues). When posted (embedded?) however, someone, somewhere, stands to be offended. And if it wasn’t my original idea to begin with, then I don’t need the added grief. Clients are hard enough to keep in this real estate cycle without rubbing their noses in triple digit Market Time. And professionally speaking, there’s a much better way to do it.