Pages

Thursday, 24 February 2011

You...

You've been writing poetry again
I can spot that leaky pen on your lip
From miles away
And your tongue with the stale taste of metaphor still on
Which you've tried to brush away
Pah!
The verses linger still in your kiss

You've been writing poetry again
Don't worry, I can tell
It's that fingertip smell
The keyboard stain
The pinky poised above delete
Pushing out your veins
Why this fucking vain obsession?
Lines layered with double meaning
And painstakingly revised
Which you pat into shape
And stanzardise

If words are your food
Why do you play with them
Use them for tools to confuse and condense?

You've been writing that dense poetry again
There's a rhyme in your mind
And a line in your eyes that I can trace
I can see it in your face
'Cause there's a rhythm that you're tapping
And it's not mine

You've been writing that poetry
Yeah, I know you by now
I can hear it in your diction
Your dirty addiction to watching couplets form
The smile as a simile emerges
Your urges to splurge your emotions
Onto innocent sheets

You've been at it again, I lie?
It's the tell-tale tic of your head
As puns pull up seats on your screen
The debris of undeveloped phrases
Onto pages
The twists of your meaning
As you spit feeling into words
And shuffle lines into verse

You've been injecting rhythm into those lines
You're just a meter away from lunacy
And it's pathetic
The way you're dressing things up in imagery
And symbolism
Because let's face it
You're just inventing new rhymes
And new ways
To say the same old things
Like you're in love
Or like you're scared
Or like you're angry
Like you're confused

Because you don't understand the rules
And you use a poem as a ruse
To redraft them in metrical form
And this isn't normal

No, this isn't normal at all

P.S.

You've been writing on walls
Instead of fighting in wars
Your Bic-gripped hands
Should be handling concrete grit
You should grit your teeth and grin and bear shit
You should be more functional
You should be more like your brother
You should be less of a dreamer
You should be cleaner
More productive

So shut down your PC junk
Put down your dictionary
Pack up your pens
And close your books
Unsquint your eyes and look
Look out at the world
Go on, brave the cold daylight
Of the outside
Without the cloak of allusion
Without the joke of your delusional imagery
Without the hope of a metaphor or simile
Without the seasoning of rhyme
To waste your time

You should be ashamed
Of doing the strange things to language that you do
While the Earth still turns
And cities riot and burn
You must learn
That life is not a blank page
For you to scrawl your doo-doo ideas on
Because there are too many wrongs to write

Goodnight

No comments:

Post a Comment