Metre and rhyme
So they teach
Is how the poem goes
Pentamic ways of old
Cat rhymes with bat
Love rhymes with dove
Aardvark rhymes with…..
Don’t write verse about
Aardvarks

Long short short
Short short metre of old
Dactylic hexameters…what the!
Classic poems of old
Lambic pentameter
Vedic and Sanskrit metre
Hendecasyllable which rhymes
With nothing

Lines and half lines
Stressed/unstressed
Ceasura…what the!
Trochaic, Spondaic,
Anapestic, Amphibrachic,
Pyrrhic
More like diseases than verse
All this to say
This is how I feel
This is today.

Lost in laws of language
Taught as days of old
All these strictures
All this binding
To confuse, confound
I choose to ignore
Refuse to conform
Free-form
As the words come
Commitment to paper
True from the heart
Unrhymed, unmetred
Fuck you I say
While thinking
Fuck rhymes with duck

Tim Alderman
(C) 2014