When I was young and learning how to write,
I was taught that poems had rhythms tight.
The words, the lines, the rules — they served as walls
And that without these strictures all would fall.
The rules, they said, were there to form a spine —
The art was how the writer, so confined,
Could nonetheless communicate a thought
Or tell a story worthy of a plot.
Is this a poem? Are these the rules?
This is a box. We are not fools.
This is a style of dress,
And though I must confess some attraction
To its rigors, a rigor without reason
Leads to death before its season,
A lack of breath and a quite a mess.
Though freedom leads to chaos, somewhere in the din
And ululation is an order of its own:
The soul,
Freed from its own tourniquet,
Creates a novel sobriquet,
Devours its own soliloquy,
Absorbs itself and then
In the wake of the cacophony
Exhales
Pauses
Inhales
And begins again
— Clio 04.10.21
