pmmu #18, 19, 20, 21: catching up!

Somehow I can never remember that, outside of Spring Break, April is not the peaceful, warming float through National Poetry Month that I'm hoping for.  Instead it's the start of the fourth marking period, the start of the youth soccer season, and this year it included a stint by my spouse on the Appalachian Trail.  Single parenthood this week pushed me over the edge of "through-careful-organization-and-a-neglect-of-sleep-though-not-exercise-I-can-do-1001-things"  into "must.stop.at.1000."  I'm behind on my project by 4 days!

So here I am with a chance to catch up, on Poem in Your Pocket Day!  (Which also came upon me as a surprise; I'd looked it up and I was sure it was April 28th.) In honor of pockets, here's today's poem:

Cool  

Boy, boy, crazy boy,
Get cool, boy!
Got a rocket in your pocket,
Keep coolly cool, boy!
Don't get hot,
'Cause man, you got
Some high times ahead.
Take it slow and Daddy-O,
You can live it up and die in bed!

Boy, boy, crazy boy!
Stay loose, boy!
Breeze it, buzz it, easy does it.
Turn off the juice, boy!
Go, man, go,
But not like a yo-yo schoolboy.
Just play it cool, boy,
Real cool!

You know what that is, right?  It's Riff singing to the Jets before the rumble in the stage musical West Side Story, with music by Leonard Bernstein and  lyrics by Stephen Sondheim from 1956.  In the movie version, the song is sung by Ice instead, after Riff's death.  I'm interested to learn from Wikipedia that this "song is known for its fugal treatment of a jazz figure, described by one writer as "possibly the most complex instrumental music heard on Broadway to date.  Let's watch the gang dance it out and remember that real dancers don't need spandex.

 
I'm now going to catch up with some not-too-fancyposts that are other songs whose lyrics, all by themselves, with or without their music, sound like poems to me.

Happy Rocket in Your Pocket Day!