Are You Mr. Robbie Yates? Yes? Some Papers for You, Sir. Here. ‘Bye, Now!

*****

(A word of orientation: Robbie Yates has an eponymous WordPress site — say that five times fast — featuring outrageously excellent LOL rhyme and meter. His icon is a black coffee mug surmounted by a ceramic warmer in the form of a prominently mustachioed, hatted and bespectacled gentleman’s head.)

*****

I’m thinking about making Robbie
My next sickly compulsive hobby
Until that durn Yates
Sensibly abates,
Intensively I plan to lobby

It’s not like he isn’t a threat
To the general public, you bet
He caused our auld bitch
To drop her next stitch —
More threatening it does not get!

He thinks it is harmless to laugh
But he wasn’t part of the staff
Of three men and a pup
It took to get her up
Her restoritave liquor to quaff

Nor do his jokes only take hold
In dangerous ways, of the old
But kids still in school
And the nerdy uncool
Are also at risk, I am told

One little girl, Anne, of great promise
Turned spiral-eyed and autonomous
Under the influence
Of some silly inference
About Remus and Romulus

Although she did then try her best
To listen to Yates’ humor less
She frequently fell,
So did not do so well
On her next crucial history test

And as for the geeks, well, they prize
One glance from his porcelain eyes
Aspire to no hug
Just hoping his mug
Will turn their way as a surprise

It quickly consumes them, you see
One sunny day, it’s “Look at me!”
Then ‘fore you know it
That giggling poet
Is teaching them how to eat brie

And other unsavory stuff
And as if that weren’t bad enough
They make themselves tiny
And paint themselves shiny
And learn to say nothing but guff

Darndest doing to imitate
Ceramic they think is so great
It’s not like it’s agile
Which is good, ’cause it’s fragile
And has to go home in a crate

I mean, wouldn’t it do some good
If we made him leave our neighborhood?
He lives just beyond
That very small pond
Would you like to sign this? I would!

As yet we do not seem to know
Where further there is he can go
It’s not very far
To the nearest star
Besides, there are folks there I know

The situation’s sensitive
Where can we send Robbie to live?
Where he will be heard
By nary a nerd
No stitches old ladies may give

It furthermore must be a world
Housing not a single schoolgirl
No one of good taste
To appetite waste
No coiffures in dismay to uncurl

No children to point with wide wonder
At the coffee he seems to be under
So calm and so warm
His cylindrical form
While his humor their sanity sunder

Some planet so extremely far
Where people like me never are
Which is only fair
Because from out there
He can just keep on raising the bar

The rest of us can then commence
To be serious and to be dense
Slipshod rhyme and meter
Dead horse? We will beat ‘er
Since she can put up no defense

So if anyone thinks of a place
In the far nether regions of space
Where he can stay
With his body of clay
His serenely bespectacled face

And his excellent damn poetry
Please send the good word here to me
He’s such a buffoon
We can’t act too soon
As Robbie himself will agree!

(Woncha, Robbie?)

*****

(A further word of explanation: Master Yates’ diabolically clever response was to write me a perfectly sweet and lovely poem, which you will all be glad I cannot copy out of the comments section and paste here, in the hopes of being allowed to remain on planet. As I am the silliest, shallowest and vainest of creatures, this most obvious of tactics worked just like a charm, and he is safely reensconsed in poor, long-suffering Australia. Inside information indicates they have recruited the native medicine men in a so-far vain attempt to sequester him in the Dreamtime…)

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