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Contests : Wergle Flomp Free Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2006 : John Ryan
SONNET FOR MY ROOMMATE
Shall I compare thee to a boiled egg?
Thou art more rotund and more flatulent:
Rough winds do shake the rims of my Touareg
And my passenger-side door now has a dent:
Sometimes too hot, your flatus burns my eyes
And often is my suffering vision dimmed;
And my very brain, by the thousands of cells, dies
By hypoxic shock through nose hairs —alas!—just trimmed;
Will thy eternal stench ever fade
Since thou lost possession of that fart thou didst ownest?
Or shall Death haunt some fairer-smelling glade
To escape the burrito stench from which thou groanest?
So long as men cannot breathe, or eyes cannot see,
So long lives this, and this takes life from me.
(after Shakespeare's Sonnet XVIII...with apologies to the Bard, who probably appreciated a fart joke)
Sent as a joke to Pen Pushers Publications, this poem was a finalist in the 2006 Wergle Flomp humor poetry contest sponsored by Winning Writers.
About John Ryan
I am the chair of the Clayton High School English Department in St. Louis, Missouri. I completed my MFA in Creative Writing at UM-St. Louis, where I served as an editorial assistant for Natural Bridge literary magazine. My fiction appears in the Fall 2005 issue of MARGIN: Exploring Modern Magical Realism. Elements of Surprise, my first chapbook of poems, was published by Sungrazer Press in 2002, and my poems have also appeared in River Styx, Black Buzzard Review, U.S. Latino Review, and Delmar. A set is forthcoming in Locuspoint. When I'm not reading or writing, I play with my daughters, eat my wife's delicious cooking, or stare at my backyard.
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