the other day (confided reginald), when i was killing time in the bathroom and making bad resolutions for the new year, it occured to me that i would like to be a poet. the chief qualification, i understand, is that you must be born. well, i hunted up my birth certificate, and found that i was all right on that score, and then i got to work on a hymn to the new year, which struck me as having possibilities. it suggested extremely unusual things to absolutely unlikely people, which i believe is the art of first-class catering in any department. quite the best verse in it went something like this:

have you heard the groan of a gravelled grouse,
or the snarl of a snaffled snail
(husband or mother, like me, or spouse),
have you lain a-creep in the darken house
where the wounded wombats wail?

it was quite improbably that any one had, you know, and that's where it stimulated the imagination and took people out of their narrow, humdrum selves. no one has ever called me narrow or humdrum, but even i felt worked up now and then at the thought of that house with the stricken wombats in it. but the editors were unanimous in leaving it alone.

from "reginald's rubaiyat"