All real poets start off by being fascinated by the sound of words. Do they all write something but mean something else?
My granddaughter has renamed her gerbils. They are now called Joey and Chandler, after the two chaps in Friends, of which she owns a box set. The gerbils live in a dirt-floored box known as a gerbilarium: a word she likes. Not long ago, one of the gerbils disappeared into the dirt. Pregnancy was suspected. I warned her that gerbils have lots of babies and that there was a threat of gerbilisation. There would be all kinds of gerbils. Verbal gerbils: good at words. Herbal gerbils: averse to nicotine.
I didn’t tell her about the fanatical rightwing Goebbels gerbils: too grown-up an idea for her, although Friends, when you think about it, is pretty grown-up, too. Just as she was readying herself for the onset of gerbilisation, it turned out both the gerbils were definitely male. Hence their new names.
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