It's Another Fauxetry Post!

Unfortunately I discovered the sheer awesomeness of former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins many months too late to do my recommended summer reading and still several months too late to attend his poetry reading.

But here today I make it up to Billy Collins. I know he was disappointed when he stepped into the packed lecture hall and saw my seat, the one in the front row that read "Reserved for Sincerely Yours", as empty and desolate as the top of James Carville's head. Inside he wept but on the outside, struggled on. Today his suffering can end because today he joins a select society: "Poets Whose Mailboxes I Don't Want To Put Rabid Mice Inside Of" (PWMIDWTPRMIO).

To serve as an induction ceremony,  I post two of his poems below, alongside a fauxem of my own, an oldie which pales in comparison.

Flames
By Billy Collins

Smokey the Bear heads
into the autumn woods
with a red can of gasoline
and a box of wooden matches.

His ranger's hat is cocked
at a disturbing angle.

His brown fur gleams
under the high sun
as his paws, the size
of catcher's mitts,
crackle into the distance.

He is sick of dispensing
warnings to the careless,
the half-wit camper,
the dumbbell hiker.

He is going to show them
how a professional does it


Another reason why I don't keep a gun in the house
By Billy Collins

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

The Campfire in Space

By Sincerely Yours

It will be pathetic

As the faint sparks on the lighters die from lack of oxygen

And the marshmallows expand in the near vacuum

We'll float, with our raw hotdogs on space-age sticks

And tell ghost stories that no one can hear

Because sound doesn't travel in space

If only HAL would let us back in.