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I’ll lure you from your hungry school;
My name calls out for living bait
To trick you in a darkened pool—
String you along and tempt your fate . . .

My sharpened verse must bear some blame,
Making you bite to reel you in.
Living up to my threaded name
Rods may strain and the bobbers spin.

Some use nets (like John and Peter)
Casting weights to sink. My floaters
Bring good news, maintaining meter
Joy for pond, lake, river boaters.

What’s my line? Think meat. Crochet.
Short and barbed, like life’s deceptions,
A shot some basketballers play.
Noses. Other misconceptions.

PROMPT 21:
write your own poem in which you muse on your name

PROMPT 20: write your own poem that uses an animal that shows up in myths and legends as a metaphor for some aspect of a contemporary person’s life.

Ornithological Grafting 

Plumed Serpent/Fabled Phoenix/Rare Black Swan:
Let Poetry now shoot you from the sky;
Your sin, though trendy, shall no more rage on . . .
They’ll see you’re just a Dodo by and by.

You puffed and fanned, a dazzling Peacock Star
It’s high time you descended here to earth.
We see you for the Emu that you are:
Your gender, like your sex—assigned at birth.

We live in times of innovation.
Winds of change affront the nation;
wind most welcome—by a few
(the masses know not what to do
with engineered progressive change,
their morals slow to rearrange).
And thus, in ornithology
we find an apt analogy…

Phoenix-like the vulture rose
in rainbow raiment, from repose
Its plumage all askew, a freak:
a mutant with a painted beak
borne of winds but lately blown.
This strange new hybrid (yet unflown)
did twitter forth an avian boon.
It preened its plumes and croaked a tune:

I represent that rarest fowl,
far wiser than outmoded owl…
A dazzling swan of change am I
brought forth to liberate the sky!

(Yet more appeared a fractured emu;
fair is fowl post-op… they tried to
cross said emu with an ostrich!
(What the hell—the surgeon got rich
changing apples into mangos;
altering the twos to tangos…)

Fresh from gender suicide
he moulted into she. Beside
herself (itself?) with grief, regarded
previous selves as false: discarded
Sir for Madam overnight;
fixed it, mixed it, made it right.
Since God was wrong the first time ‘round,
Man (or something) thus is bound
hormonally to tweak and mutate,
hastening rebirth’s freakish due-date.

A manly bass—and yet the face
was poorly paired in his/her case
Soprano ought to have resounded;
yet the voice left one confounded.

Rainbow bracelets notwithstanding
this was clearly modern branding
(on the forehead—like a beast?)
well, Jesus told the truth at least:
that angels are of neither gender
(hence no need to check the member.)

Lest we offend endangered species
I commend transgendered theses—
paired with warning and a fable
as they turn the feathered table:

We may nurture fair to foul
while nature shrieks a hideous howl
but foul to fair cannot return;
thus trapped, both Eve and Adam burn.