Another Example of My Shitty Poetry (It Sounds Like the Thunder Is Sitting on Top of the House)

Whenever there's a thunderstorm, a friend of mine has to comment on it on Facebook.  "Three loud strikes!," she'll note.  "The cats are already under the bed!"  

"OMG! That's the loudest thunder I've ever heard!"  "Big thunder in the evening!"  "It sounds like the end of the world!"  "Haven't seen the cats since the lightning at dawn!"

I don't know what she thinks will happen if thunder and lightning arrive and she doesn't comment on it.

A couple weeks ago, after a typical Georgia mid-afternoon thunderstorm, she posted "It sounds like the thunder is sitting on top of the house!"

That line got stuck in my head. The words "It sounds like the thunder is sitting on top of the house!" kept repeating themselves over and over again in my mind.  Lying in bed, I couldn't sleep as my mind kept parsing that line, trying to figure out why it was so compelling.

I think it's the rhythm - there's an urgency to it.  It's not quite iambic pentameter.  For one thing, there are seven feet (sets of two syllables) to the line, not five, and the emphasis isn't always on the second syllable.

There are 14 syllables to the phrase, and sometime around 2:00 a.m., I realized that in musical terms, the syllables comprised two bars.  They're in 7/8 rhythm, expressed as 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4.  To make it more complicated, the emphasis is on the 2 beat in the first line and on the 1 beat in the second, as follows:

it-SOUNDS-like    the-THUN-der-is 

SIT-ting-on        TOP-of-the-HOUSE

Sometime around 3:00 a.m., I decided that it wasn't 7/8 rhythm with shifting emphases after all, but five lines of three beats each, emphasis on the middle beat and a rest on the last line:  

it-SOUNDS-like    

the-THUN-der

is-SIT-ting

on-TOP-of

the-HOUSE (rest)

And what is that?  3/3 rhythm?  14/15?  Musicians, or those with any sense of music theory or notation, will clearly recognize that I have no idea what I'm talking about musically.  Writers and literary students will likewise recognize that I have no idea what I'm talking about with regard to poetry.  But anyone repeating the words to themselves will realize that something in the phrase gives it a kind of flow and urgency.  Say it out loud and you'll see what I mean.

"It sounds like the thunder is sitting on top of the house!"

"It SOUNDS like the THUN-der is SIT-ting on TOP of the HOUSE!"

"IT SOUNDS LIKE THE THUNDER IS SITTING ON TOP OF THE HOUSE!"

Whatever the time signature, whatever the poetic meter, my mind began thinking to that rhythm.  "Da-DAH-da da-DAH-da da-DAH-da da-DAH-da da-DAH." Sometime around 4:00 a.m., I started to compose a poem in my head to that beat.  I altered the first line a little just to make it more genuinely and originally my own, and then stated thinking of words that rhyme with "house." "Mouse" immediately came to mind and seemed like it would come in handy when talking about frightened cats, but that also seemed a little too obvious.  What else rhymes with "house?" Louse? Douse? Grouse?

Any time I thought of a rhyming word, that rhythm, now so ingrained in my mind, would almost immediately come up with a line ending with that word. After I had several lines composed in my head, I got up out of bed (it was already starting to get light out outside) and wrote them down, not because I thought they were so great but just to get them out of my system so I could finally relax and get to sleep.

It worked.  When I finally got up late the next morning, this is what I found written:

The sound of the thunder is almost on top of the house

I can't feel the moisture but water has soaked through my blouse

I'm enchanted of course - the spell of a cat on a mouse

Or the conjugal ease of a wife enjoyed by her spouse

Imagine my disappointment. I hadn't expected to find greatness, but I thought that I'd at least have found something that made sense, not the doggerel scribbled above.  

But here's the odd thing I realized - while those lines absolutely do not work as poetry, if they were sang as the lyrics to a song they'd probably hold up, at least if the vocal performance and melody were even halfway competent.  I tried singing the lines and found that they fit very neatly to the tune of the classic David Bowie song Queen Bitch from the album Hunky Dory (1971). 

My late-night poetry might be lame, but is it really any worse than:

I'm up on the 11th floor and I'm watching the cruisers below

He's down on the street and he's trying hard to pull sister Flo

Oh, my heart's in the basement my weekend's at an all-time low

'Cause she's hoping to score so I can't see her letting him go

Now, I'm not saying that my poetry is equal to Bowie's songwriting, I'm just pointing out the magic that music and performance add to lyrics. If my late-night lines somehow appeared in Bowie's song, would it really have been any worse?