Bangkok from A to Z

As a writer, I have come to kind of adore the maddening twists and turns of my mother tongue (English, if that wasn’t clear). While I would never proclaim to be anything more than average at writing, I do have an extreme fondness for the dark corners and innate flexibility of the language. For instance, I am able to rattle off both pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis and floccinaucinihilipilification without pause, but look to George Carlin as somewhat of a patron saint instead of Shakespeare, Milton or Chaucer (you’ll see why below). At any rate, one of the things I like to read is poetry, but I’m not very good at writing it. That’s why I found it interesting when I had the thought of writing a blog post about “Bangkok’s A to Z” what I started writing came out as a poem. So I decided to run with it…

I know it’s not sophisticated or groundbreaking, but it satisfied my once-a-decade poetic urge, and now I don’t have to write another poem until the beginning of the 2020’s. By then, it will likely be trying to find a word that rhymes with ‘arthritis’.

A is for awesome, which Bangkok can be;

And B is for Bangkok, traffic jams and palm trees;

C means Chao Phraya, the River of Kings;

D is for D-Cups, which are few and far between.

And next we have E, which stands for expat;

And F, come on, we all know about that;

G is for Gaggan, great molecular taste,

And H just means hot, every day in this place.

With I we have India, little, not big,

And J gives us Jatujak, the best shopping gig;

K stands for “Kaa”, always pleasant to hear;

And L is for Ladyboy, which some love and some fear.

“Ahhh! I mean…hello.”

M begets Mom, hi-so title, not mother;

While N can mean Nana, a place like no other;

O is for “Oy!” when a Thai is surprised;

And P mean police; very few like those guys.

Q is for queer, which Thailand embraces;

And R can mean race, judging solely by faces;

Sanook stands for fun and it starts with an S;

T gives us tones, and a linguistic mess.

U means umbrella, a must when it rains;

V gets the shaft – said like “w” every day;

W can mean women, the most beautiful kind;

X-rated – illegal, but easy to find.

Y brings on Yaowarat, a Chinese-style maze;

And we finish with Z for those lazy beach days.

Eh, amusing fluff at best, but I thought it was cute. But if you want to see a real master at work, watch George Carlin spank the English language like a red-headed stepchild: