34; Icky

"Icky, the belligerent hissing penguin..."

Of course the word I wanted to describe Icky was 'malevolent', not 'belligerent'. But though 'malevolent' had the correct meaning 'belligerent' had the correct sound. Oh what was I to do?

Oftentimes the right word is the wrong sound, I find. Only when the two combine through luck does one get the correct outcome. Generally I find the outcome to be poetry.

Incidentally Icky is a foot-high penguin made of hair, cardboard and duct tape. His only produced sound is a low warning hiss, much like a velociraptor before strike.

He has a mate named Sticky. One of these days they're going to catch me off guard and something initially terrifying and in retrospect amusing will occur.

Some friends of mine and myself made a little poetry this afternoon, perhaps. We make poetry all the time, we just choose not to record those instances of beneficent word alignment in our daily lives. Some people have enough gall to harness this fortune and become poets. Some try and harness it and become lunatics. Some are indecisive and do both. For the purposes of this article being a useful source of information for our lives I suggest if you pursue the latter option that you become a poet first, and then a lunatic. After you choose to loose the battle with sanity there aren't generally rematches. But many say they are happy to won out over it in the end.

Working of a round-robin exercise, where you can only respond to the line before yours, we attempted to write the opposite. Example: "She will say no" would have the opposite, perhaps, of "He said yes." Below are our two outcomes:

"One day I woke up to find he was gone, but there was a note.
Today I went to sleep to dream she was here, but she didn't leave a note.
You woke yesterday from the nightmare of him, only to find a note he left.
I went to sleep today to the dream with her, always losing the song she brought.
You woke up last night from life without him, never lost the speech he took."

"Wednesday, yesterday, Shannon took two of these and called me in the morning.
Friday, tomorrow, Bill brought one of those, not speaking to her that night.
Monday, yesterday, Sue took two of these singing with him this morning.
Saturday, Hue gave half of that after speaking with her last evening.
He gave the other half to her when they woke up the next morning.
She took the whole thing from him after they went to dream the last evening."

If "I went to sleep with the dream of her, always losing the song she brought" isn't poetry, what is? I know that's not the line from above, but I assure you the meanings are precisely the same. We must only worry that in times the original is unfaithful to the translation.