"Poem" doesn't rhyme.

It occurred to me that the word poem does not actually have a rhyme. Ironic, isn't it?

Of course, the always-helpful site RhymeZone, friend to writers of song and limerick, tried to come up with a few. 

2 syllables:

bro hymn, ho hum, know him, loham, low hum, pro-am, show him, spoem, throw him

3 syllables:

below him, roboam

4 syllables:

jeroboam, rehoboam

Meh. Take away the ancient kings and all you have are weird combo words and sorta rhymes. As example, RhymeZone shows that no less a person than Oliver Wendell Holmes resorted to a near-rhyme for "The Iron Gate":

Where all goes wrong, and nothing as it ought?

Old age, the graybeard! Well, indeed, I know him,--

Shrunk, tottering, bent, of aches and ills the prey;

In sermon, story, fable, picture, poem,

 

It's not bad, but there's still something imperfect about it, more suited for light verse than anything serious. That's okay for a trash poet like me, who just diddles with words for laughs, but Ollie W. was a pretty serious guy. "Poem" is not "pohim." It's not quite Tom Lehrer rhyming Harvard with disCARvard, but it's in the same zip code.

I like to play with the rules themselves rather than just look the other way. If you've hung around this drugstore for a while you know that I wrote a poem about eye rhymes (words that look like they should rhyme but don't) and words with silent letters, as well as verbs that defy reason and words with very few rhymes. My favorite may be my ode to Wile E. Coyote, though.

Rather than follow a standard rhyme scheme like A/B/A/B or A/B/C/B, I wanted to simulate the chaos of a Looney Tunes cartoon, where the storytellers follow a structure but all within is crazy. This was my rhyme scheme:

A

B

C

C

D

D

E

F

G

G

E

B

F

A

I

I

Every line has a line that rhymes, but most of them are not where they ought to be. I'm not sure it succeeded, and may have just confused people, but I was happy when I was finished.

Surely, not since the time of Roboam

Hath been such a wackadoodle poem

Roboam: "You can say that again!"

P.S.: Those who remember H.R. Pufnstuf might be interested to know that RhymeZone came up with a scant few rhymes for orange, which are even worse than the ones for poem. However, Witchiepoo was wrong; there ain't no rhyme for oranges.