Poets' Tiff When we had done with rhyme And if you ask me – Which you haven’t, but that’s okay – I won the day Hands down So we picked up where we ended I and my Bits and piecemeal masticating Literary friend and author of ‘Morceaux’ (spare me, I sighed, to self) Never more than a nose hair in length On the page After he declaimed his latest ‘Magnifying opus’ of twelve lines (His words, not mine) He started in again About meaning and precision and the like Like Occam’s razor run amok You know – The type who’d tear the wings right off a poem And leave his powdery thumbprints Stuck all over your lapels The dirty filthy entomologist Which is exactly what I called him When he ripped my minor masterpiece to Smithereens If he was sore it didn’t show His lips were simply curled into a sneer So I replied And I confess I may have gone a bit too far When I inquired if he’d planned A thousand-letter poem Which I knew he got Because his hands were on my throat And it took the girlfriend – His, to be precise, Since I was in an interregnum at the time – To pry his fingers off Once the insect dust had settled I could take her in In truth, she was a shock because I thought his pistons fired Above the eyebrows, Not below the belt Courtesy demanded thanks Of one kind or another Not to mention tact So when magnanimously he left To claim the tab Turning to her I opened up with every best intent But couldn’t shut my trap Before the quip slipped through About no arguments in matters of Distaste This time It was she who lunged And for a guy who’d Parse a syllable on the fly Or at the drop of an epaulet It seemed ages before he finally got the hint And stormed off like the trooper He aspired to be ________________________________________________________________________ Emanuel E. García, Leaf Thoughts, One Hundred Poems, 2013 |