See, forty bucks in cold, hard cash
can fill your trailer with gin trash.
And for growing fine tomatoes,
forty's pretty small potatoes.
The big box products like Black Cow
will truly set you back, and how!
The cotton hulls and seeds and stems
ejected from the cotton gin,
stored a year in a giant pile,
makes the heart leap and brings a smile.
Earthy, loamy, a little sour,
magical black growing power.
By the barrow, then tilled under,
it's a veggie growing wonder.
Its Round-up contents raise concerns;
the pile's so hot, it nearly burns.
Big veggies are the things it grows,
but I'll look out for extra toes.
You say “po-tay-to”…I say “po-taa-to”…just eat the French fries…
9/25/2021
Difference of Opinion Poetry Contest
I can breathe up here, on top of the mountain,
a new found hike,
its vertiginous peak small potatoes,
since faith was restored.
when my boot hit the top,
we'll make a go of it,
the nagging rush of pain
like novocaine wearing off, unlocked.
I'm erasing the past,
right off the blackboard of time,
quickly,
like the impatient high school teacher.
What she needs,
I simply can't provide
I'm just small potatoes to her
She wants to live big,
live first class
Live luxuriously
Those designer shoes she desires,
oh my,
would cost a week's salary
When a woman think you're small potatoes,
she don't think much about you
When she only has eyes for the big spuds,
find another girl who loves tater tots too
How To Squeeze
When you share toothpaste in a family it is a drag to have to flatten out the tube every time you want to express your little dab of paste. Inevitably, someone else has squeezed in the middle and messed it up. Small potatoes Huh!
When you squeeze the toothpaste tube
Please squeeze it from the bottom,
If you use another way
You're doing something rotten.
Metaphorically they are
As rust to iron
In the fields of
The hunger demon
Ravaging timelessly
Small potatoes
Are like
The Grace of God.
I think this Footman likes to snicker,
and the human situation is the kicker,
when one becomes sicker and sicker,
and it’s one’s time to die and cry for one’s soul.
Prufrock’s point is well-taken and understood
for the Footman is an end of life reality who is
the “King of Finality” and doesn’t care while seeking
mankind’s banal end, since Man is really small potatoes
in the Universe’s great and grand pecking order.
I think that I shall not want to meet this Bamboozler,
at least this would be my choice, if I really had one.
I doubt that I, like others, could ever be like Lazarus.
The Footman presents us all with a one-way ticket to
what awaits mankind beyond the pale of death!
And so we all await the end of our finite time as
measured in grains of sand and the clock on the wall;
waiting for the day and time of our final departure,
and hoping not to hear the scornful snicker, snicker
of the Prufrock’s Eternal Footman!
Gary Bateman, Copyright © All Rights Reserved
(July 17, 2014)
Rusticated granite Great staircase
Mistress of a vast wintry country estate
Drew in a breath brilliant jewelry poodles
Soft wooly sun warmth wash over her body
Mahogany gold mouldings red flocked walls
One sausage two small potatoes green peas
Borche pears in brandy dollop of kahlua cream
Tall windows green upon green of countryside
Double storeyed space balustraded gallery level
Full length portrait carved peir glasses fireplace
Eat the flesh and throw the stem into the fire
Smell his aroma eminating from her body
Radiating like a slow tide on a flat beach
Pronounced flush rush of heat building
Hand on her knee Waggling a finger
Smartly pared the fruit humming
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