Today, my cultured friends, we shall mix some grace and refinement into the proceedings. By which I mean, I shall recite some elegant poetry.

Ready? Here goes.

Roses are red,

Violets are blue;

My fish are my favorites,

But you’re OK, too.

Ah, poetry, the language of romance. If you’re a goldfish.

Wait, wait, I’ve got a better one:

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

You look like a monkey,

And you smell like one, too.

Alas, thou guesseth correctlyeth. I ain’t much when it comes to this poetry thing. I try, but I just don’t get it.

Besides, I’ve seen yellow roses, and why would something called violet — which is a color — be blue, which, if I remember my crayons in kindergarten correctly, is a different color.

Poetry confuses me. Culture is a conundrum.

I tried it as a kid, writing verses of my own as a third-grader. It baffled me and I swore off the stuff until my Uncle Tom taught me a much better piece of rhyme and reason:

Birdie, birdie in the sky,

Why’d you do that in my eye?

I’m sure glad that elephants can’t fly.

Now THAT I understood. Simple. Brilliant. Profound. And containing all the culture a young boy would want to encounter.

The other day, I was sitting in my chair, minding my own business, not bothering a soul, when a fine line of rhyme snuck up and smacked me alongside the head. Before I could stop, I heard myself reciting a masterpiece from my childhood.

Algie saw a bear,

The bear saw Algie,

The bear was bulgy,

The bulge was Algie.

Nothing beats the cultured classics.

My late wife, Terry, preferred an even more succinct verse from the works of the great poet Wallace Tripp:

Marguerite, go wash your feet; The board of health is ‘cross the street.

Some days you could barely walk through our house for all the culture scattered about in clumps of meters here and piles of verses there.

But poetry is all just snootiness and snobbery. It’s often a way in which we can ponder the hard questions of life. I collected this example from the great poet Anonymous:

Have you ever seen a sheet on a river bed? Or a single hair from a hammer’s head? Has the foot of a mountain any toes? And is there a pair of garden hose?

Are the teeth of a rake ever going to bite? Have the hands of a clock any left or right? Can the garden plot be deep and dark? And what is the sound of the birch’s bark?

But mostly a good poem is entertainment. And we boys loved to entertain each other on the playground with this one, which we acted out with great gusto and not a little snottery:

Rose are red,

Violets are blue,

I’m allergic to flowers,

Ah-ah-ACHOO!

Roses are red, violets are blue, write Burt at burton.w.cole@gmail.com, and he might write back to you. And violets are purple, you goober; get a clue!