At first I wanted to write a poem about how awful it would be to eat a rat for lunch, but then I thought about it a bit more and turned the basic idea upside down. I would write about how wonderful it would be to eat a rat for lunch. This is something you can do in your own writing and is called irony. When you use irony, you’re describing or talking about an object or situation in a way that’s the opposite of what you really mean. So when I say that I love eating a rat for lunch, you know that I’m just kidding. I’m being ironic.
Also, when you’re writing a poem, you don’t have to report what actually happened or even base your poem on exact facts. Take the original event and exaggerate it. You can add to it, combine it with something else that happened to you, or turn it upside down and inside out. If you do this, you’ll start to see that new possibilities open up to you, that the creative process is a powerful tool. When I wrote this poem, I compared a rat with lots of other things that I thought might be gross to eat—things like scrambled slug, baked baboon, and buzzard gizzard. I simply had a good time, and you can do the same.
Think of something awful that you wouldn’t enjoy eating, and write a poem about how wonderful it would be to eat that awful thing. Make it funny or silly or ridiculous or weird, and don’t be afraid to experiment or exaggerate.