Queen of Chaos
I am the Queen of Chaos,
Empress of Entropy.
Czarina of Disorder,
My stuff is all at sea:
My desk is full of ashtrays
My floor is full of books
My bureau’s full of clothing
And my kitchen’s full of cooks.
My living room has weasels
My dining room has rats
My bathroom’s home to elephants
And my belfry, it has bats.
Leslie Lippincott Hidley is retired from the safety business and lives in a small town in southern California. She has published poetry in Sparks of Calliope and other writing in the Ojai Quarterly and Ojai Monthly. She has just published her first long poem, “The Burglars’ Ball,” available on Amazon and a YouTube video of the same title. It’s a poem about a family of marauding raccoons and how they’re entertained by a boy and his grandfather.
Leslie, better to be queen of something than not queen of anything. I appreciate your humorous well-rhymed poem. I might have changed my last line to “And my belfry’s full of bats,” but that is nitpicking. It just seems smoother. I enjoyed and identified with your humor.
You are right! Your line is better… give me your phone number please???
325-703-1670
Roy, you are a rascal! Thank you!
You have described my life, Leslie!
Great poem!!
Thank you!
Actually, I think that Ms. Hidley’s original line was better (“And my belfry, it has bats”). This is an example of the repetitive figure of speech called mesodiplosis, where a phrase is repeated in the middle of several lines. She does this in the second quatrain with “full of,” and it makes symmetrical sense to continue the figure in the third quatrain, with “has.”
Thank you, Mr. Salemi.
“BelFry’s Full of Bats” is more sonorous to my ear.
Better bats than badgers!
Great stuff, Leslie.
Badgers are cranky!!! Thanks for the kind words.
This is fun to consider item by disorderly item, Leslie! The bureau full of clothing suggests laundry gets done regularly, but isn’t a kitchen full of cooks said to spoil the soup? We can never guess what’s next when there’s chaos to contemplate.
Actually, what I meant when I wrote that was that the top of my bureau was full of clothing – only later did it occur to me that other people may not be as messy as I am! Thanks for reading.
similar to a popular ditty here –
O to be a total failure,
And to fail both up and down,
and around and back and over
with a circumpuscent sound.
…which has the embedded contradiction that no one using the word “circumpuscent” would actually be a total failure.
wonderful!!!
I will try to remember never to accept an invitation to dinner from you, or to be a house guest under any circumstance. The brother of a friend of mine was accidentally killed by an elephant.
Was he in the bathroom?
No, Leslie, he was in the compound when he suffered a medical crisis. Apparently the elephant, who loved him, tried to revive him with its foot. A bathroom would involve much closer quarters and wouldn’t require any co-morbidity for the mishap to happen.
Ahhh there’s always a risk when an elephant loves you
The town where I live use to have an elephant named Tara . She lived up the canyon and used to come into town to roller skate. I don’t know if she ever fell in love.