There’s No Quibbling With Quixotry

There’s No Quibbling With Quixotry

Graciously, he dubbed me
the Goddess of the Game,
our one love in common
which, I’m happy to say,
he’d never won
though just once,
when this Wizard of Wordplay,
discombobulated by a double dose of dengue
and Montezuma’s Revenge
lost all language,
it was close.

But then today, mid-Scrabble,
his damned angel showed up,
not one of those quixotic,
poofy-winged,
blinged-out,
star-dusted
Abbott Thayer celestials
hanging in the Smithsonian,
mind you,
but a rainbow on the floor,
a rainbow!
between us
who chimed, “I’m yours!”
polychromatically
as rainbow angels do,
and gestured
prismatically
to the tiles on his tray
to arrange themselves
miraculously
on the board into
“quixotry”
a word so unexpected,
so strange it looked
like a Spanish windmill though
foreign languages aren’t allowed,
but it turns out he and his angelic prism
really are better together;
because this one’s in the dictionary,
leaving me, sad to say,
defeated
and I don’t know
if I’ll ever get over
the rainbow.

A while back I read about a guy named Michael Cresta, a carpenter from Massachusetts who scored 365 points in a game of Scrabble with the word quixotry, which means a wild, visionary idea, an eccentric notion or act; a quixotism (from Don Quixote of La Mancha)

After I read NaPoWriMo’s Day 9 prompt to write a poem containing the titles of 5 songs from one of our playlists, I knew where I was headed.  Here are my songs from Pandora:

“One Love” by Bob Marley
“Wordplay” by Jason Mraz
“I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz
“Better Together” by Jack Johnson
“Over the Rainbow” sung by Israel “IZ” Kamakawiwo’ole