An Adventure in Verse

(OMNIVOROUS = EATS ANYTHING)

(ELECTRO-OMNIVOROUS =  EATS ANY KIND OF ELECTRIC, ELECTRONIC, OR BATTERY-POWERED ENERGY, INCLUDING WI-FI)

©Amie Hill 2018

All Rights Reserved

These verses were written for my great-nephew Tre Richards, to whom the events described may easily have happened. Or maybe not. 

Tre

 Tre was a boy who liked to know Why?

And How? And How Many? And When?

 

He loved to discover how things came apart

And put them together again,

He’d combine bits and pieces in interesting ways,

And then watch to see what they would do,

Which kind of explains how he happened to make

That Electro-Omnivorous Goo.

It was gloomy and gray on that damp summer day,

And Tre stared outside as it poured,

It seemed as if it had been raining for weeks,

And he was incredibly bored,

He was tired of reading and video games,

It was too wet to play in the park,

So he thought that he’d mix up an excellent batch

Of slime that would glow in the dark.

He mixed the ingredients up in a bowl

As he’d done when he made it before,

Borax and water and glowpaint and glue,

But he thought he should add something more.

 

Now, his mother had told him that he never should

Play with chemicals—he could get hurt,

So he salted the slime with the safe sort of stuff,

The kind that she said was “inert.”

That means that it wouldn’t blow up in his face

Or combine into poisonous gases,

So he added some gelatin powder for bounce,

And for stickiness, jam and molasses.

Some glitter for sparkle, some silica gel

To balance the wet and the dry,

Some magnetic filings for shimmer and spice,

Some bath oil to bubble it high.

Then, for no particular reason at all—

Just the way that he felt at the time,

He picked up a triple-A battery, and

He dropped it—plop!—into the slime.

 

Right then his mom called him for dinner, and so

He ran to get something to eat,

Then his dad took them bowling; they had so much fun

That when they got home, he was beat.

He was much more than ready to crawl into bed,

He could barely hold open his eyes,

So he never noticed the slime that he’d made

Had practically doubled in size.

 

A rambunctious thunderstorm blew in that night,

As frisky and fresh as a pup,

It tickled the triple-A battery and

The slime gave a jump—and woke up.

 

And when it awoke, it was hungry and cross,

And the bowl it was in felt too tight,

So it trickled a tentative tentacle out,

And slithered down into the night.

 

It encountered more triple-A batteries, and

It sucked all the spark from their shells,

Then it got hold of Tre’s cellphone and soon

There was no power left in its cells.

 

It sipped all the juice from his laptop, and next

It drained all the charge from his Wii,

Then suddenly sensed that the window led out

To a boundless electrical sea.

It slipped through a crack and slid over the sill,

Its charge growing steady and strong,

Just surfing on WiFi and slurping it up

Like a sponge as it shimmered along,

 

From midnight to sunrise it snuck house-to-house,

Sipping and draining and lurking,

And folks waking up were beginning to find

That electrical things had stopped working.

 

As it streamed through the streets it could scarcely be seen,

While reflecting the sky’s shining blue,

It could easily pass for a puddle instead

Of Electro-Omnivorous Goo.

 

All the day long, people tried to find out

What was draining appliances dry,

But it wasn’t till nightfall they spotted the Goo

By its glow in the darkening sky.

It squatted atop a utility pole

Like an octopus clutching its prey,

And as fast as the current streamed into the wires,

The greedy Goo sucked it away.

 

There seemed no end in sight to its huge appetite

For electrical juice to devour,

Neighbors gathered beneath it to wonder and stare

At the stuff that was stealing their power.

Now, Tre was a part of that wondering crowd,

And he hadn’t a clue what to do,

For he’d seen from the bowl to his window at home

The trail of that runaway goo,

But just then he noticed a curious fact:

As the Goo gobbled volts for its dinner,

Its electrical matter grew fatter and fatter,

But the glow-Goo grew thinner and thinner.

 

As thin as the air in a stretched-out balloon,

As thin as the skin on a bubble.

And Tre suddenly knew, by the look of the Goo,

They were headed for serious trouble.

So he ran through the crowd and yelled, loud as he could:

“Quick, everyone, get inside!

That treacherous Goo is about to explode,

Better scoot, better run, better hide!”

He sounded so certain that everyone ran

And hid out behind sturdy walls,

They huddled together for safety and then

A silence fell over them all.

 

At first they heard only a soft slurping sound

From the Goo as it sucked on the wire,

Then all of a sudden a whoosh and a roar

Like thunder and lightning and fire!

And then there was silence, and when they peeped out

Nothing was left of the Goo,

But there shone in the sunset a delicate mist

Of Borax and glitter and glue.

The wires were fried; they were left in the dark,

But just then nobody much cared,

They all felt so grateful that no one was hurt,

They all said how much they’d been scared.

 

They called Tre a hero for warning them all

Of that dreadful explosion of Goo,

Then they broke out the candles, and lit up the coals

In their grills for a grand barbecue.

But Tre started feeling uneasy inside,

And that sense of uneasiness climbed

When he thought of his friends and his neighbors and how

Their electric connections were slimed,

 

So he went to his grandpa, a clever old man,

And said: “Gramps, I don’t know what to do.

They say I’m a hero, but I was the one

Who made that pestiferous Goo!

 

“I thought I was being so careful and cool

And cautious and clever and smart

—Well, except for that triple-A battery;

I guess I should mention that part.

 

“And pretty soon someone will try to find out

Who created this terrible mess,

You say I should always be honest, and so

I just think I ought to confess.”

His grandfather thought for a moment, then said:

“Tre, that Goo is such dangerous stuff

That the fact that you know how to make it, my boy

Can never be secret enough!

 

“Just think what some people would do to find out

How to mix up that treacherous Goo,

So I think to be safe, this had better remain

A secret between me and you.

“And also I want you to promise me now

You won’t write that formula down

And you won’t make mysterious mixtures at all

Unless there’s a grownup around.”

Tre was happy to promise; he hugged his grandpa

And they smiled and shook hands on their pact,

And Tre felt much better, and never again

Was so careless, and that is a fact.

 

A committee debated the source of the Goo,

And eventually made the decision

That all that electric disturbance was due

To an odd atmospheric condition.

 

Well, that was okay with Grandpa and Tre,

And besides, it was practically right,

Since that thunderstorm sure played a part in the start

Of events on that strange summer night.

Young Tre will grow up to do marvelous things,

But there’s one thing that he’ll NEVER do,

And that’s tell anybody the secret of making

Electro-Omnivorous Goo!