Poetry

Poems baffle me,
leaving stanza-shaped
headaches.

Rhythm & rhyme
& counting syllables;
Who has the time?

Shakespeare and I
argue in sonnets,
but heroic,
my couplets are not.

I copy down
limericks &
paste them to
my friends' laughter.

Reciting haikus
makes me seem
smarter,
but I don't know
what I'm talking about.

I wrote abecedarians
on mother's days
over traced handprints,
but she threw them away
when I turned
seventeen.

Any other forms,
I don't know,
I always focused on
prose.

If I wrote a verse,
with a drying pen
& a paper
covered in math,
it would have a touch of
free.

I buried my soul
in a casket of words,
all the poems
I claimed to have
read.