The Dancer

Sammy Brown can boogie down.
Her dancing is superb.
She knows a bit of every style
to make body sway and swerve.

She'll squeeze her knees,
bounce up and down,
bow low to brush the ground.
Then lightly up on tippee toes,
in a lovely ballet pose.

She's leaping round from foot to foot,
so graceful 'cross the floor.
Then sadly, Sammy's performance ends -
they've opened the bathroom door.

You're lucky to have had this chance
to see a master of the pee-pee dance.

-B.C. Byron
A rare and masterful performance of the classical potty dance
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There are many forms in the classical art of pee-pee dance:

  • The knee squeeze
  • Ants in the pants
  • The squat-and-wiggle
  • Tippee toe
  • The lurching turtle
  • Grab and bend
  • Redfaced freeze frame
  • Screaming hip wiggle
  • The bounce n’ scoot

While it can be entertaining to watch a frantic camper wiggling outside the outhouse, one has to wonder if the peepee dance is actually effective. Does bouncing around like a nut and grunting like a boar actually help a person hold in their urine longer? If there are any biology or doctoral students reading this, please consider the potty dance study for your doctoral thesis. I’d really like to know if my dancing efforts are worth more than just a laugh. It should be a simple study. Have 200 people drink 10 sodas each and wait for 2 hours. Then inform the crowd that there are only two bathrooms available. One bathroom will have a waiting line with a narrow railing on each side where the scientists can herd the people in tightly, ensuring that there is absolutely no room for performing the potty dance or any kind of wiggling. Keep packing them in tighter until there are 100 people in the line. The remaining 100 people will be led to an open field with a single port-a-potty in the middle – plenty of room to get your boogie on. Now a team of interns with stopwatches and notebooks comes in to time how long it takes for people to have an accident. My hypothesis is that the peepee dance is only a mental distraction from the discomfort of the bathroom urge. The two groups will wet their pants around the same time on average, but group B (in the potty dance area) will feel like they held out longer when they’re surveyed about their experience. But you may prove me wrong, and get a doctorate degree out of it too.

I don’t recommend conducting this type of study in a public park or other place where lingering tinkle smell will cause a problem. And be sure to bring plenty of disinfectant and free trousers for all the participants. But this is important work and I’m sure you’ll be able to easily find the funding. If the potty dance is indeed found to be effective at staving off wet pants, a follow-on study could be conducted to determine which dance moves have the most benefit. I could see this turning into a marketable product where parents of gradeschool children pay for a series of learning videos that teach their kids the optimum moves for restroom emergencies. Not only could families stay longer in the movie theater without interruptions, but it would be a great way to get exercise. Sort of a potty Zumba workout.

The Poem that I’ll Never Write

There's a poem that I'll never write,
It's under lock and key.
There's one I'm keeping out of sight -
The poem that is me. 

Beneath a mask of jokes and puns,
Behind the rhymes and rowdy fun,
I worry I'm the only one
That feels behind,
So little done,
My understanding's just begun. 

'Cause sharing me takes bravery
And writing this lets others see
My worries and anxiety,
How soft my outer shell can be. 

But feelings I keep out of sight,
I see you feel them too.
This poem that I'm soon to write -
It's also about you.

-B.C. Byron
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It can be difficult to share things we write. When I first started making poems, I had a difficult time sharing them with anyone, even my own family. I started out with only funny poems and they would really make me chuckle as I read them to myself, but I wasn’t so sure how other people would react. Well, thankfully my poems did make a few people laugh when I finally started sharing a few with family and friends, but it was a much bigger leap to start posting my poems online and in social media for everyone else to see. Then it was an even bigger leap for me when I started writing the occasional serious poem. It takes bravery to create something that represents your real self. I was concerned that people might find the feelings I was sharing to be upsetting, cliche, petty, or just plain annoying. The more feeling I put into a poem, the less brave I felt about sharing it. Once in a while, someone does find my work rediculous and may even tell me so outright. Sometimes even I go back and read something I wrote and think, “what the shnoobers was I thinking?” But I’ve also learned that much of the things I’m hesitant to share are the very things that other people will relate to the most. It’s a big sigh of relief for me and my readers when something I say matches up with feelings they have had or are experiencing right now. It’s also nice to know that I’m not the only 40 year-old that still find poems about pee-pee dances and throwing up to be funny. We have more in common with others than we realize and that should help us share our thoughts with confidence. Not everyone has to like my oddball poems and my cartoony scribbles of people losing eyballs, but someone out there will get it and be glad I shared.

Write, draw, dance, sing, rap, or do whatever creative thing you do with real feeling. Keep plugging away at it and trying new methods. You may never be famous, but there is still great value in it.

A note about this poem style. I really like the idea of putting contradictions into my poems to make a point stronger. In this case, the poem I’m writing is the very one I claim that I will never write. I also like to use phrases such as “burning cold” and “here and nowhere”. You can try this out by writing first down a phrase or a story and then picking a few words to flip to their opposites. This can surprisingly strengthen the mood or idea that you were trying to create. Using contradictions on purpose can also steer a poem or story in a new direction you hadn’t thought of.