Battle Hymn of the Neighborhood Carnival

Over the weekend, my 10 year old and I went to the used bookstore in search of new Hardy Boys books. While he paged through The Masked Monkey, I browsed the poetry section for blogging inspiration and stumbled across a collection of poetry from the civil war.

One book passionately described Civil War poetry as “filled with moral fervor” over slavery and preserving the union. Heavy stuff, and fascinating to Mad Dad Poet, the engineer with limited schooling in writing and literature.

After looking at books in the morning, we took kids and friends to the local traveling carnival in the afternoon. It’s the standard school parking lot carnival with 10 rides, lots of carnival games and really disgusting carnival food. One of the other Dads described his first churro as a “sugar-coated, grease-filled donut death stick”. All the kids enthusiastically ate one..... AFTER going on the rides.

Combining the "moral fervor" of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” with the weekend carnival activities resulted in the poem below.



This was the magic weekend with the feared “Nativity Fair"
A yearly time that ev’ry father wishes was not there.
Consuming all spare dollars in the noisy summer air
With one short, simple rule.


(chorus)
Don’t eat corn dogs and a churro
Don’t eat corn dogs and a churro
Don’t eat corn dogs and a churro
If riding “Vomit-Tron”.


The boys insisted that we ride our bikes to Carnival.
A parking lot of steel and rust, a 5th grade Bacchanal.
With food court and the teenage kids it’s just like Stanford Mall.
And all kids win goldfish.

(chorus)


Our kids enjoyed the spaceship ride that spins with dropping floor.
They rode the up-down, tilting thing and asked for tickets more
The ’66 Ford Mustang was most surely not a bore.
But "Vomit-Tron" loomed high.

(chorus)

Of three friends only two would venture onto "Vomit-Tron".
The third’s head was still aching from adventures over yon’.
The youth survived the upside-down trip, skyward and beyond.
With paper bags in hand.

(final chorus)