If you’d like to try writing a nonsense poem, you don’t have to think of dozens of weird things and string them together. There’s a much simpler and more effective way. Start with one silly idea, and then pretend that you’re a reporter, and ask the questions that reporters ask: Who? What? When? Where? How? Why? You might also ask questions like What if? and Why not? Now if you were to ask these same questions about real people, the answers would be pretty straightforward. You’d find out the their names, where they lived, who their friends were, how they spent their time, and so on. But… if you asked those same questions about that silly thing, all the answers would be silly. That’s what I did when I wrote “Ballad of a Boneless Chicken.” I pretended that there really is such a thing as a boneless chicken, and I asked those same reporters’ questions. All the answers were automatically silly, and I had all the material that I needed for the poem.
Another thing to think about is point of view. I chose to write the poem from a boneless chicken’s point of view, because that’s how it occurred to me, and it seemed to me at the time the best way to do it. However, I could have just as easily written it from another point of view, such as that of a visitor to a farm who encounters a boneless chicken, from a regular chicken’s point of view, or from my own point of view. All those poems would have been quite different from one another. It’s even possible that some might have turned out better than the poem I wrote. Also, I didn’t have to restrict myself to a single boneless chicken. I could have written about a farm where all the chickens are boneless and perhaps where the geese and ducks and cows and pigs are boneless too. The possibilities are endless.