What Rhymes With Sasquatch?

This is a Friday Sasquatch Report World Exclusive.

The following poems were discovered by an obscure German intellectual and sent to the editors of the Friday Sasquatch Report for worldwide distribution.

Be sure to read his notes below.

First Love

To be the sapling you use to brush your teeth!
To be the rock you crush to gravel beneath your foot!
I want to braid wildflowers in the hair between your breasts.

Breakfast

Into the woods the running campers vanish.
Their bacon still spucks on the fire.
Their beer is cold and good.*

*Note the Hemingway-esque tone of this line, which suggests the sasquatch may have found a copy of "The Sun Also Rises" carelessly dropped by a fleeing camper.


Sasquatch Koan

If you call my back hairy, you deny its reality.
If you call it smooth, you deny the fact.
What then will you call my back?

Middle Age

When I rise each morning
a mat of back-hair covers the ground.
Baldness approaches.

The discovery of these four poems represents the fruit of forty years' research. Ever since I was a lederhosened boy in the wooded hills of Bavaria, throwing stones at the hairy mountain men and running squealing back to the safety of the family castle when they chased me; ever since I read of the adventures of my great predecessor, Diogenes Teufelsdrokh, who was stomped to death under mysterious circumstances (how could such circumstances be unmysterious?) while camping in the Okanagan Valley in the early 80s; ever since I first saw a grainy film of a tall, hairy man-like creature running into the trees next to a stream, I have dreamed of the mighty Sasquatch of North America and wondered what his poetry would be like.

I confess these poems are not what I imagined. I expected rough, rugged, primal, primitive poetry about battles with game wardens and heroic raids on campsites; these haiku have forced me to reconsider my entire concept of the sasquatch. Clearly the sasquatch has a quiet, reflective side; there is something almost philosophical in him, a reservoir of glassy calm at the centre of the hairy tornado that we occasionally glimpse in the depths of the forest.

The influence of the Far East on these poems, and particularly on the "Sasquatch Koan", suggests sasquatches may have originally crossed the well-known "land bridge" from Asia to North America, bringing some fragments of Zen philosophy with them.

I will continue my researches into sasquatch poetry, and update the Report with any new findings.

--Dr. Hieronymous Weltschmerz, Teufelsdrokh Chair of Things in General, Professor of Primitive Culture, Vocational College of the Okanagan Valley