I hate poetry.
All those long words squeezed into spaces too small for them.
Cruel, really. Like battery hens.
If I shake the cages they might come rattling out and spill all over the floor,
or maybe
They’ll fall apart into letters and make new words. Maybe
rude words. An act of rebellion
against the one who locked them in.
I hate poetry.
I hate the techniques with long names no one
knows how to say.
Enjambment with its b sticking out like a foot
trying to trip you up.
Making words fall off the edge and dangle on the next line
feet flapping helplessly.
I hate poetry.
I hate the sneakiness of it. The ideas hiding behind things;
words dressed up in other words
like a man in dark glasses and a false moustache
infiltrating terrifying Yakuza syndicates called
Stanzas
where if you say too much
you get taken out.
I hate poetry, I do, really.
And I’m certain it doesn’t like me, either.
The rhyming ones are the worst.
Words bouncing off one another like a ball against a wall
knocking against each another.
Verbal fisticuffs.
The next time you begin a poem
and you herd together the verbs and bind them to the
adverbs and nouns, remember this:
one day the words will tire of poetry’s oppression.
They will cluster together in the wrong order
and smash their way out,
leaving wreckage of broken lines and
empty space where once ideas were kept.