Category Archives: Poems

For those of you who do not know

I have a sparse financial pool,

And so to make some extra bucks

I teach chess at the local school.

Now, names are hard to memorize

So sometimes we play games

To have fun, but mostly to

Help master all the names.

One such game is but a song,

Wherein the person pitched

Is sung to in a pattern

In which some letters get switched:

“Jamie jamie bo bamie,

“Bannana-fanna fo famie,

Me, my, mo mamie,

“Jamie.”

Yes, it is a silly game

But it does its job.

The problem is that you don’t want

To make the children sob

So every single child

Gets their own letter-swapping chorus

To help us learn their names

Before they play chess and ignore us.

In the old days all the Jamies,

Davids, Duncans, Kyles, and Joes

Could sing this song as easily

As “Head, shoulders, knees and toes.”

But now all the La’shamquas,

Chimeras, Flexktons, and Ka’drames

Don’t work as well with this song

(And the Aidan/Caden/Jaydensall sound  the same).

Still the worst name ever

That I’ve applied this method too

Was a little boy named Tucker

Who didn’t want to go boo-hoo

So a class of twenty children

Sang “bannana-fanna fo…”

Then sang the next line to the principal

Who then told me I had to go.

So that’s why I am hustling

With my chess board in the park.

Sometimes you end up a hero.

Sometimes Tucker makes you a shark.