My Nana gave me jelly beans
And so of course I went and ate ‘em
I don’t know how to tell her this
But – oh, my gosh, I hate ‘em!

I wouldn’t say that they were bad
I’d say that they were worse than awful:
They’re gruesome, noisome, smelly beans
And ought to be unlawful.

One tastes like bile; one tastes like grout;
And one’s like liver mixed with trout.
But while my Nana’s watching me
I daren’t spit ‘em out.

Some taste like toadstools on my tongue
Some taste like vipers might have viped ‘em
Some may have come from Baby’s diaper
After Baby diaped ‘em.

I wish I had a time machine
So I could tell her not to buy ‘em
… And those are all the reasons why
I will not let you try ‘em.

Image: Here’s A Jellybean For You by Flickr user Cindy Mc.

UNDER THE HOOD:

Page 1
I was working on more poems for my Alphabet, Schmalphabet series; at upper left are the letters I’m still missing. At some point I went from “jumping bean” to “jelly bean,” then started slapping down rhymes. Nonsensical rhymes, too — because it turns out there aren’t as many sensical rhymes for “jelly bean” as you would hope.

Page 2
I started a new page, and started writing new and different stuff… but as you can see, I kept coming back to the jelly beans. None of this is in order, and some of it is from much later in the process, after I’d started writing on other pages too…

Page 3
This is the facing page to page 2. Early on, thinking of jelly beans, I wrote a quick quatrain… which I may use later, but it didn’t end up in the poem. Note the lists and lists of rhymes – I like to write down words so I can roll them over in my head without having to think of them anew each time. I liked the “viper / viped ’em” line, but for the longest time I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. That bit of the poem hung me up the longest, and took me a couple of days.

Page 4
At some point I have to write down what I’ve got so far, because the pages get too messy. I played around with the order a lot, because I couldn’t be sure which ordering would best lead to the ending that I hadn’t figured out yet!Page 5
I knew  this poem needed a better ending, so I fumbled around trying to figure out, first, what it should be, and second, what it should say. This took a long time.

… and the final polish I did on my computer, so no notes.