99 Crepes du Jour

You and I in cooking class
burn some pancakes, get an F,
throw them all across the lawn
till one by one, they were gone.
New York Times photographer,
flash the headlines: “Something’s out there!”
soaring through the schoolyard sky
99 crepes du jour fly by.

99 crepes du jour
soaring through the schoolyard sky:
“Panic pads! It’s aliens!
They’ve come to school from somewhere else!”
The media springs to life,
all looking through one camera eye
half-focussed on the schoolyard sky
as 99 crepes du jour flew by.

99 editions print
99 new experts meet
to worry, worry, super-scurry,
get the “facts” out in a hurry:
“This is how we all must act.
This is it, the first contact!”
9000 callers on the line
as 99 crepes du jour fly by.

99 knights of the air
with super-high-tech camcorders.
Everyone’s a scoop reporter.
Everyone’s a Walter Cronkite.
They alone can clarify,
Identify, and classify.
Scramble in the junior high
as 99 crepes du jour fly by,
as 99 crepes du jour fly by!

99 “friends” I have had:
every one a newspaper.
It’s all over and I’m staring quite hard
at this dust that was a schoolyard.
I could find a souvenir
just to prove the school was here,
and here is a crepe du jour
I think of you and eat it up.

(a parody, of course, of Nena's "99 Red Balloons")