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