Pointless Post -- Because it's Friday -- Poetry Slam

A PC survivor named Peter
Measured his leaks by the liter
Then he had radiation
And to his consternation
His limericks now leak pointless extra syllables from their meter.

Can you do better? I've set the bar low.

Okay.

There was a guy named Steve
Who caught kidney stones in a sieve
Now his prostate is gone
And he still has his bone
And can pee a stream you won't believe.

I moved your bar lower.

Ah, losing one's sex life to cancer
Limp and leaky will scarcely entrance her
She asks: isn't it better
To be living, if wetter?
Its a question no man likes to answer.

On one of my real life blogs, where my name isn't Peter and the world doesn't know about my PC, I posted a poem which I scheduled ahead so it would be posted while I was in the OR with the Da Vinci robot. Here it is.

Cheap but fun -- Italian --
it was a young man's ride
and he could own the highway
with the right girl at his side.

You had to buy them quickly,
a berry fresh with dew;
The sun would quickly fade the paint,
you had to get them new.

And the wind would sing sad love songs
to him at the wheel
and for a while he'd ride in style
on youth's ephemeral steel.

There is a reason it reminds you of your Fiat. When I was shopping for my first car or two (back in the early 70s) I had an unconsummated 'thing' for the 124 Spyder. It was a King Kong/Fay Wray relationship -- the desire was there but because of my size (6'4 just under 300lbs) nothing was going to happen. But still, what a man cannot have he can still research (thus the popularity of Playboy magazine) and I talked to a lot of people who owned them.

Since you remember your car with a mixture of fondness and irritation it sounds likely that you failed to follow the iron law of Fiat ownership -- never buy a used one and sell them before they reach three years old or 40 thousand miles. They were a heck of a nice little car for 35 thousand miles then they fell apart. Since Fiat has only recently relaunched in the US I don't know if that law still holds.

So, yes the poem is about old Fiats, and also a metaphor for other things that we struggle to keep on the road.

Iambic Pentameter is cheaper if you buy the whole set. I don't use the trochaic bits much.