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DAMN BAD POETRY
Forced meter and circumcised vocabulary;
Decrepit, effeminate watery rhymes.
Vicarious experiences of designed spontaneity;
Saccharin joy or throttled pain.
Victorian sensibilities; Worse,
Anticlimactic passion, complicated by
Stubble scraped skin in sensitive regions.
A sterile break
In a line;
Or lines uneven, unsteady, overloaded, redundant,
Bending over backwards to lick the boot of
The next verb -- Nauseatingly obsequious,
Sycophantic in fawning over those workhorse
Words: Toadyish. (Yes, they do all the moving,
But it's the nouns what bear the weight.)
And God help us when the muse begins
To bob and weave and spin, brainstorming
Lines...Agate, ancestry, argumentation, assembly,
Bank, blood, business, cable, crease and crinkle,
Furrow, credit, products, pedigree,
Demarcation, Maginot, melody, lineage,
Outlines, pipelines, freight lines; Strained.
(At which point, All you are doing
is straining.) Finally,
Perhaps, you notice
You've turned the last line early,
And you finish it, like a drunk
Only half-way to his stupor when
He spews it all, and all is
Lost -- doomed, condemned,
Undone.
~ 9:26 AM 11/8/03
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10th sig ~> "How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms?" -- Aristotle 
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