How to poem

I saw that Rachel blogged about the "how to" poem, so I'll take a stab at it. I actually had a little trouble with this exercise, not from a writing standpoint, but because when I started thinking about it, I couldn't come up with anything of any particular interest that I can do that would make a good poem. Honestly, it frightened me at first. It had me thinking: gee, are you really that uninteresting that there is not one thing you can do that is worthwhile to write about? When I cook, I microwave hot dogs, so I couldn't write about any cool family recipe like the example we read in class. I really don't have any particularly cool talents like juggling or flipping my eye lids inside out or anything of that ilk. I settled on how to hit a baseball, which is probably as vanilla a topic as I could have come up with. But when Matt read his accidental how to poem aloud in class, it opened up the exercise for me. Just because it was a how to poem didn't mean it had to be something people would understand, like cooking, in fact, it didn't even have to be something real. I could have written it about how to walk on water, how to disappear, how to hook a mermaid. So, coming away from the "how to" poem, at first I felt a little nervous, but after some further thought, I was able to convince myself that just because something isn't real doesn't mean there isn't a way to do it. That is invention, isn't it?
*Michael McCune