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 Poems2013