Ice Cream for I Scream

It’s summer, and just the sunniest

of afternoons.

Outside the sanatorium,

in the arboretum, the attendees

are served their teas.

The strudel is toothsome

when Herr Stumpf, from the lectern,

contradicts the consensus

that I is for ice cream. No, now

he’s proposing that I’s for spaghetti,

all spaghetti, he avers,

being once alphabetti,

all spaghetti being once that capital I

that it is when it’s dry,

not the maddening doodle that it is

when it’s done and awry.

His audience listen,

but once he has spoken,

then beneath their applause

that’s not fulsome but token,

they don’t soften, no rather, they stiffen.