The nose have it

The RSVPs are trickling in. So far none of my family can make it. Kelley's boss is busy. And our friend Fergie, perhaps the only guest who could aptly read Gertrude Stein, is being her cool self and bustling around the world with her new fiance. Picture me with my bottom lip sticking out in a pout. OK. I've pulled it back in.

I found a poem in the Best American Poems 2005 anthology that I thought would make a great addition to the ceremony. It is a poem that plays on the sounds of words and the repetition and rhyme doubles back on itself just as the pattern is getting old. But Kelley thinks it is sophomoric and that I could write something better. She loves me. So, I am including it here to everyone to enjoy.

I Want to Be Your Shoebox
Catherine Bowman

(Memphis Minnie's classic blues line "I want to be your chauffer" was miscopied in an early Folkways recording song transcription as "I want to be your shoebox.")

I want to be your shoebox
I want to be your Fort Knox
I want to be your equinox

I want to be your paradox
I want to be your pair of socks
I want to be your paradise

I want to be your pack of lies
I want to be your snake eyes
I want to be your Mac with fries

I want to be your moonlit estuary
I want to be your day missing in February
I want to be your floating dock dairy

I want to be your pocket handkerchief
I want to be your mischief
I want to be your slow pitch

I want to be your fable without a moral
Under a table of black elm I want to be your Indiana morel
Casserole. Your drum roll. Your trompe l'oeil

I want to be your biscuits
I want to be your business
I want to be your beeswax

I want to be your milk money
I want to be your Texas Apiary honey
I want to be your Texas. Honey

I want to be your cheap hotel
I want to be your lipstick by Chanel
I want to be your secret passage

All written in Braille. I want to be
All the words you can't spell
I want to be your International

House of Pancakes. I want to be your reel after reel
Of rough takes. I want to be your Ouija board
I want to be your slum-lord. Hell

I want to be your made-to-order smorgasbord
I want to be your autobahn
I want to be your Audubon

I want to be your Chinese bug radical
I want to be your brand new set of radials
I want to be your old-time radio

I want to be your pro and your con
I want to be your Sunday morning ritual
(Demons be gone!) Your constitutional

Your habitual
I want to be your Tinkertoy
Man, I want to be your best boy

I want to be your chauffeur
I want to be your chauf-
feur, your shofar, I want to be your go for

Your go far, your offer, your counter-offer
your two-by-four
I want to be your out and in door

I want to be your song: daily, nocturnal
I want to be your nightingale
I want to be your dog's tail