Three Hundred Seconds

by Parker Gambino

(On the Occasion of the Wedding of Meg Ryan and Jacob Gambino, 16 June 2019)

Five minutes is what I was allotted; is it a lot?

I’ll try my best to do three hundred seconds on the dot.

Is anyone going to get every single reference here?  No

My advice is to just go with the flow

And once this verse breaks into a trot

Here’s the scoop on what’s what and what’s not,

The type of rhyming we’ll permit

Well, expect both slant and legit (i-mate)

Also, to not totally shut you out

There will be some annotations, without a doubt

But only partly revealing or explained

So a vague translucency is maintained

An occasional poem is perhaps not what you reckoned

Especially with me fact-checking every second,

In order to help it all make sense,

A bit of pedagogy offered hence:

Prepared for a specific occasion is what makes a poem occasional

It doesn’t mean intermittent or sensational

Ah, those words that can mean more than one thing

Let’s put a few together into a string

To wrap around our heads or hearts

Or any other chosen bodily parts

For just as a body has its wheys and curds

My favorite playground is the play on words

The deconstruction, the full language immersion

Kind of like the “in”-version of a version

A neologism or a spoonerism may emerge

But don’t fear the torrential verbiage surge

Threatening to throw the whole thing off track

Only once will I pat myself on the back

From rummaging in the serendipity

For the construction I find particularly witty

So I’ll pause and give my thumbs-up, personal

Culled from this barrage out of the arsenal:

Eileen, she’s good with watching the birds

Me, I’m enjoying just botching the words.

Now this guy, I’ve known him since his beginning

He entered the world quickly, with a California underpinning

In Hawaii, when it was time to leave the beach

To linger longer he would beseech

But parental insistence has its place

And then so upset, beet red his face.

Then back to the mainland we all had flown

So New York is where he really came into his own

I can’t quite account for all of his days

You turn kids loose, they find their own ways

If we’d known about all of his didn’ts and dids

We would have well wondered, was it wise to have kids?

Sometimes a rare found tidbit random

Throws light on the nature of his assimilated wisdom

And only recently has it come to my attention

From a little blurb in which is made mention

From the book of parental wisdom he has taken this page

“A concept my parents instilled in me from a young age”

The reference is to “mental health” day taking

We all know it’s a real thing – without any excuse-making

An appreciation of nature, soaked up like a sponge

And here, if into Esopus Creek you plunge

It’s bracingly cold, it’ll snap you awake

Such a different body of water from our local lake

No matter, he’s got his boats and spots to go fishin’

And notches on his fishing pole get constant addition

In the other direction, topographical ascension

He’s leading hiking parties for his friends, with the intention

Of sharing exhilarating climbs to the heights

To witness chlorophyll days and dazzling nights

Especially for the city slickers who’ve not seen what rivers

And mountains whose splendor serenity delivers

Yeah, I know I didn’t do ladies first

Of all my transgressions this is hardly the worst

If it’s true that “Seek and ye shall find”

The key ingredient is the zest beneath the rind

You know she’s led a cheer or two in her days

Can a body really flip all of those different ways?

To go to the gym she crosses the borough line – seems crazy, no?

But what the hey, it’s good enough for Mayor Bill DeBlasio

In the cheesecake incident, entertainment proclaimed to be expected

From how the cake was to be dissected

Situation in hand, she guillotined with the edge of a fork

Then the smug look of, “That’s how it’s done!”  – soooo New York

But if you be travelling and want itinerary organized

She’s so there on that, with more back story than might be realized

Like the smallest helpful tip to make my pronunciation better

That seashell cousin of yours – in Italian it’s “Concetta”

Now here’s another word with meanings twice

Fortune – either luck or riches is nice

It’s truly both regarding those here toasted

For us four parents, the lengthiest fortune is boasted

But look around amongst yourselves, at every turn,

A United Nations of bonhommie and societal concern,

We all are present, and if it makes sense

You each make a present of your very presence

Now their gift, each of us for their cap a bright feather

To bring such an extraordinary set of people together

Do my seconds have a second sense, or even a third?

Well sure they do, such a versatile word

But why stop at three? there are others I’m sure

Once you start digging things quickly turn obscure

You could look it up – it’s my personal tradition

So my final opportunity to flash erudition

Is to drag out a meaning from near-antiquity

You can each each other’s seconds be