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.