the poem

There once was a poem that was fined for rhyming too much. Had the papers covered the incident, the poem could have certainly benefited from the negative publicity. But everyone knew that nobody would read a newspaper that carried such a story for fear that the poem would be mentioned by name, or worse, quoted. The other poems were saturated with readership opportunities - sitting at the bottoms of newsstands, under newspapers at coffee bars, near parakeets, and even in the minds of the people who thought they loved poetry.

The little poem wept incessantly while pondering its tiresome redundancy, yet it was this same redundancy that made the feelings of the little poem ring false. Short of becoming a limerick and longing to be a children's fable, the sad little poem took its own life by stapling itself to a firecracker. In the true spirit of art, life sprang from death, and inspiration from pain. Love no longer rhymed with above, dove or even shove. In fact, love was entirely missing, which made the whole pile of disfigured prose seem somehow new and true.