153. This is Not a Poem

featured in Calliope Literary Magazine’s Fall 2018 edition

There are many self-proven poets who will write a big block of text like this and call it poetry but they’re all scamming you by forcing running monologue through a half-baked story in their lives that they could tell in a more grammatically-polished format that’s completely readable and artistic at the same time yet opt instead for a lazy hashdash of thought constructed in five minutes as I have done here that takes the reader thirty minutes to read by helping them to recall nothing for what is the point of writing something that a reader will forget especially if you don’t give them tools like rhyme or meter to drill it into their memory because either the story must stick out as original when it usually is not or there must be some spice of clever construction that makes it last for example all that I have written here will be forgotten by the reader because I have not helped his or her brain to categorize such a massive dump and there is no denying it is a slippery dump of information just how no one can keep an abstract painting entirely intact in their mind’s eye when a landscape is so much easier to absorb while also being harder to create well so is this block of so-called poetry exactly like an abstract painting except I’m actually trying to make a concrete statement that will not be remembered except as “oh that poet wrote a poem about how much he hates the style he wrote the poem in” but my particular word choice will not be remembered at all not because of free verse which I acquiesce as poetry because the poet makes a conscious arrangement of his words in lines but this is just a bucket of brain-paint sloshed onto a canvas where the word “poetry” is written everywhere even though there is nothing poetic about it but constantly proclaiming “Behold my poetry” which is about as legitimate as someone having a vicious bowel movement and proclaiming “Behold, my child” only because both were brought into the world near the ass though the baby will be remembered because it is organic and continues to grow whereas the other is just excess waste spilled over from an overdose of emotional laxatives and will be flushed down the toilet of time as this long rant of mine might be except for the title which will effectively stick with you since that large block of text you were hesitant to read below it was in fact not a poem and you only read it because you were ready to agree wholeheartedly with me or fight my stance but now don’t care because it was too much of a nuisance to follow such a cataclysmic mind-dump and keep mental notes on the points simultaneously though you are thinking hard on whether this is poetry or not since I have clearly said it isn’t but you have seen poems exactly like this and so now I leave you as confused on the subject as you were before or might not have been but you will still forget the body of what has been written just as you always have because this is not a poem for the reason that I say it isn’t if nothing else but none of that really matters in hindsight or does it?