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I Liked To Rhyme In The Morning
In the mornings, my mother and I practiced rhyme---
between early breakfast and the inevitable time
to be transported to elementary school.
She asked me to do this for the experience:
the sentences I rhymed did not, often, make sense---
but sounded like the ravings of a fool.
I gave to rhyme the full determination
of word structure, content, and punctuation
(as much as could be in vocalization).
I did not mind if grammar was inverted,
or if I summoned the dreadful "Do-Does-Did":
my errors were glaring (not one was hid).
The little poems sounded forced, wrenched, and blurted.
Having done fully nineteen years of prep,
I am amazed what schlemiehl talk can schlepp
on to this site, and strike maddened pose
as poetry---it ain't even good prose.
At best, it sounds like discount greeting cards,
at worst like English shattered into shards,
but find---among us---both welcome and quarter.
Their babble towers are smeared, and rank with mortar
that they have gathered from pits of Shinar---
not even pitch, but just a fetid slime.
Such pages pages that do such damage to rhyme
spit out of them like morning's mouthwash swish,
are good only to wrap a stinking fish,
or to replace litter as catbox liner.
Starward
