The Blue Men of the Minch



It is told that In poor weather or big seas, the Blue Men would come for you.  They would haul themselves—embodiments of storm and high water, malicious mermen—onto the deck, ready to pull you down. But then, they would  give you a single chance. The leader will throw you a line of verse and, one by one, everyone on board, from the skipper down, needs to offer a reply in like rhythm and meter. If by some chance all can answer poetically, the ship is freed and the Blue Men, those slimy *******, slide away to find another victim.

http://celticqueens.blogspot.com/2011/02/blue-men-of-minch.html
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Sept.­ 25th, 2012
2:51 AM

Thus it is in the real world.
Cancer, death, betrayal, disillusionment,
("Whatever," he snickers)
Rises up quick, bitterly blatant and obvious,
Pulls you down slow, enhanced by a phony lover/friends in disguise,
Eager, learned, in the ways of drowning you,
Testing you all, all of us poets,
Under fire, under siege, facing inevitable defeat.

Yes, you too, a poet.

You misheard.
It's not the poetry in motion,
But in emotion, where you too can win
A noble peace prize.

On certain days,
In uncertain times,
We are all Olympic athletes, poet laureates.
Some train all their lives for the seminal,
Most of us, wholly unprepared for the eventful,
Or worse, the tempered draining of the uneventful.

In the place where anger and fear commingle,
When the battery is dead, the only pole negative,
When sounds of life energy discharging skin-tingle,
In the hour, when the unemployed wake and walk,
Their past and future human debts crowding all other thoughts,
When the parent-less child cries out to the sound of no answer,
When we ask, why is my bed empty of love,
The Blue Merman are visiting and vesting,
Recruiting on your campus for new graduates.

Small, half consolations is all that's left on the table,
Single words, trite phrases of repetition,
why me,
Yield no comfort,
sate not, deafen and infect ache.

So commandeer the words hidden within,
Sort them by rhyme and meter,
Answer the critics, bend them over to your way,
Write your own poetry, fearing no ones judgement,
Put your self out there,
I have so many times.
Death, betrayal, disillusionment,
Regular visitors in the upstate prison cell of my head,
Are all greeted with new poems of old words,
Sent packing, but confident in their inevitable return,
I write defensively between their visits,
Best prepared, a good offense is eloquent literacy.

You offer me Xanax,
I offer you this.

Your endless supplies of potent, bitter pills,
No match for recombinations of Webster's diction,
All of us lesser poets of a higher degree.