THE TOWERING BURGER

My friend Matt challenged me to write a poem about burgers tonight, so I had a little play around. Sometimes the two of us zip into town for a man-sized bite to eat, and I think tonight it felt like those days were both long ago and still far away. Poetry captures those ideas really well - the longing for the old and pining for the new, so Matt (a gentleman and a scholar) told me to get on with it. Here's a little window into my process...

(Everyone cool has a process, right?)

First I wondered what rhymes with burger? Not much scope there. Murder? I'm not getting macabre - especially not for a half-rhyme!

Secondly then, I found myself imagining a little town called Beefburg - a quaint German town in my head - painted houses and quiet market square, gables and a fountain and pigeons and cobbles. A shady character (his name would have been Ferdinand Werber or something that gets us close to some rhyming possibilities) gets caught stealing meat from the butcher (Herr Von Skeet with his shopful of meat) and tries to hide his ill-gotten gain between two halves of a loaf of bread. Well. Too complex to write as a story in poetry form.

In the end, I returned to my main beef (ha) with burgers - and that's that sometimes they're so tall that you can't really eat them without dismantling them, or using a knife and fork - and that's apparently "unacceptable" in some circles (for mystical reasons). You're supposed to squish them down and shove them into your sticky, delicious face while their contents fall apart around you... apparently. Ridiculous.

Anyway, once you've got the first two lines, the rest just tumbles and tweaks itself out in its usual silly fashion... Here's what I came up with. Matt liked it.


The Towering Burger

I once had a burger
Piled so high
That the sesame seeds
Were like stars in the sky
And the birds pinched the lettuce
To nest in the sun
From the towering stack
Of the skyscraper bun

The mayo was dripping
Like manna from heaven
(It splodged on the roof
of a 747)
The cheese was all melted!
A proper disgrace
But that's cos its corners
Stuck out into space

The towering burger
So stupidly high
With its wobbling layers
That tickled the sky!
There was no way to eat it
Or tackle its size
So I sent the thing back
And I ordered some fries