Bouts-Rimes

French for “rhymed ends.” It takes two people to make. One person sits down and lists rhyming words and the other takes those words and makes rhymed lines in the same order the rhymes were given. Requires “wit and mental agility.”

I had my boyfriend supply the rhymes:

scotch notch
will pill
grit mitt
broth moth
jack mack
fun run
over clover
great mate
bravery knavery
chose prose

At the quilted tablecloth she stirred her milk and scotch.
I would have been shouting if I raised my voice a notch.
“Each decision carried out,” she moaned, “becomes an act of will;
from folding heavy laundry to taking every pill.”

Before she’d had her freedom she’d had her share of grit;
her life smacked into a pop-up before it landed in a mitt.
I slipped into her tales while I sipped her onion broth
deciding she’s a butterfly (though she’d say she’s a moth).


If at the end we find the man who gave the beans to Jack
was the same who handed the bloody knife to Mack,
she won’t be surprised. She predicted all the fun
would become the very thing that made her drop it all and run.

And that’s all she can ruminate before her life is over;
she won’t pretend her shamrock was a four-leaf clover.
But in my eyes her shamrock is as intricate and great
as luck itself. Her thorn: her deceased mate

whose memory jabs the flesh of her mind. His bravery,
which won her heart, was blotted by his knavery.
“Maybe everything ain’t go the way I know I would have chose.”
Some moments are librettos slapped into a stretch of prose.