Kamau Brathwaite wrote
That "the hurricane doesn't roar in pentameters"
And I really believed it could be true
That Caribbean hurricanes had their own cadences, their own dances :
Ida was reggae, Allen was merengue Brigitte was gwoka
David was cha cha cha and Edith was kadans rampa and Dorian calypso
All dactyls hatched instead of iambic pentameters
Out of each island Zeus 's head
Until i met the still eye of Hurricane Muse.

Muse was her nickname
Her real name was Shar
Named after shark and share and shear
and sharon,
Named after a calypso rose
Fearless except for lizards, a rose of  tiny thorns
With a taste of a stormy black coffee
Born to a dragon of Jade and a   white *** tigress
In the midst of the 1961
hurricane season.
Shar has the S of Sébastien Sally Sam Shary Sean and Sara
The H of Humberto Hanna Henri Hermine Harold and Hélène
The A of Andrea Arthur Ana Alex Arlene and Alberto
And the R of  Rebecca René Rose Richard Rina and Rafael
And she dances not only calypso
And quadrille and zouk
But a mix as well of Salsa Hustle Affranchi and Reggae
In iambic pentameters
While she gently paints fearless green lizards
Having her five iambs of coffee
First thing in the unstressed and stressed morning
Before she even opens the syllables of her still Muse eye.

I will
Write the best Love Poem ever...
Define love, finally...
In free verse or in rhyme...
Refine love from all emotions...
Divine love for the lacking...
Confine the what, where, how and who...

Will style and technique suffice?
Shall I
Write trochee when catching my breath,
Carve words in spondee for lasting ecstasy,
Pen dactyl tri-syllables for your hair,
Use iambics for your lips,
If my best is anapest,
I'll use it for your eyes.
I can beat out tetrameters, pentameters,
And go as far as hexameters?

When I'm finally finished
Struggling over the number of lines,
I may settle for,
Elegy or sonnet,
Ballad, lyric or ode.

My final line should read:
That's all you need to know.

Let me introduce myself,
I’m Paul B.
P to the A to the U to the L to the B.
You say Paul,
I say B.
You say Paul,
I say…

I used to teach English, try to inspire.
Least you can say is, I was a trier.
Love this rapping: it gets my feet tapping,
Even though I ought to be napping.

I write poems like a word ejector,
Keep away you Grammar Inspector!
Jay-Z writes in iambic pentameters,
Making out he’s got no parameters.

Honey G just copies off him,
Oh my God she really is dim.
Does her rap like Barbara Windsor,
Do you remember Needles and Pins-ah?

Me I’m copying off them both,
Though it’s only for a laugh.
Whoops a daisy that don’t quite rhyme,
Another case of Butters Rhyme Crime.

Rap is ******* I often say,
Though it rhymes the poetic way.
That leaves me with one thing to say:
You say Paul,
I say…

Paul Butters

© PB 17\10\2016.

dating a poet is fun,
and you'll learn things about yourself,
that you never knew.
but when you leave her,
you'll be the one who's broken.

you see,
she'll break you down
into bits and pieces-

she'll carve rhymes
into your rib cage
and
she'll make your kisses
into pentameters.

your voice becomes her rhythm,
and each color in your eye
forms a stanza.

you become pieced together
and poorly stitched,
because she's taken out
the very best parts of you
and the very worst.

she's taken you,
and cut out her favorite parts,
and she'll promise to put you back together,
but the funny thing is,
she never learned to sew.

I heard there was a secret metric foot
that David knew was favoured by the Lord,
and when he penned the psalms he'd often put
this pattern the Almighty best adored
amongst the endless praise and imprecations;
unstressed, plus stressed, suffuses through his pages,
though hidden by the English of translations;
pentameters still echo down the ages.
The spondee's spurned, and has been from the start;
an anapaest's anathema, and grim.
Though trochees may be near the Maker's heart,
you'll never hear a dactyl in a hymn.
There's only one the Lord thinks worth a ****:
the sacred, the unchangeable iamb.

No Garden awaits here, I am Stone
You are Water, so We are lost
Gardener: tend my arid places

Hope for me when I have nothing
Be my Rock to future flowers

Maybe there are none left me
Masada palaced and unplaced
Our longest dreams of lions

Now is now, a furled fist
Behind my back and seen
Not at all and never again
So it never happened, we all
Agree
~*~
Read Me all the Poemes You Fynde
My Rising shall Be just to Hande
I Arise to Illustrate Your Care

Earn thus Existential Tendril
Iambic grace, Rarest remonstrance
Pentameters helplessly Entwine
Willow so Willing to Your taste

I will take your hand
Lead you far and a-
fielding

A great song eats strange hours
Horses know, wielding such power
A-stamping and snorting
Horses born crazy, now bending tame
Never underestimate planetary power
To lay you to ground

Sleeping, a runaway,
One changling thing who clings
Inside sweat-soaked dream burrows
No evasion, no escape

In such wild grown tall goddess
Places, clinging to a broken bit
A knuckle’s worth of bitter
Traded for a kiss

All is well

Iambic pentameters are quite old
As poetry fashions go now, I must say.
Tetrameters are sharper, yes,
But both are old I must confess.

Make any speech, with force, you’ll surely find
Iambic rhythms: the power of pulse.
Such things are found in common speech for sure.
And lines of ten syllables must endure.

Poetic structures set in stone are not
My way: variety is key I have
To say. Some use of rhyme is okay too.
So how you write, that’s up to you (my friend).

For I prefer to write free verse,
To steer away from doggerel’s curse.
Longer lines are languid, with gravitas.
Short ones clout,
It’s as simple as that.

Paul Butters

So what if I use simple words?
So what if I use cliche scenarios?
So what if I do not rhyme?
So what if my metaphors are lame?
So what if my stories are incoherent?
So what if my thoughts are obscure?
So what if I prefer free verse than iambic pentameters?


I write to express,
not to impress
So please, mind your own style.

Lines and cubes, unparalleled construction,
participles that don't dangle, heads of horses,
Guernica in stanzas, feelings contorted,
crying while dying, iambic pentameters,
stiff arms straight up, screams wide open,
metaphors and ******, hanging on walls of
Museo Nacional Centre de Arte Reina Sofia,
blue pillows on the floor, broken legs and
arms, ******* and agonies, montage of
blood and brutality, peace and war, love
and kisses, hits and misses, curves and
angles, bulls beheaded, silence and solemnity,
silver-blue stars bursting through open
windows, helplessness and hope. Picasso
and I.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

Poetry is the prose that is produced by the curve of your smile and the twinkle of your eyes as they defy rhyme by line every **** time making visual couplets and sensual pentameters which are as iambic as the way your words float every time you speak in that lovely alto that creates a sestina and a haiku and a sonnet and an intrepidness in my hands as they run through your hair smooth as Bukowski ******* his working class ****** earning protests from Sylvia Plath heard through the oven door which you hog so often and I laugh when you do so I sit you down and say I'll get your breakfast baby don't worry and you smile that prose poetic smile that seems to be the indefatigable source of all these literature and damage to my soul which is not mutually exclusive

I’m locking away all my metaphors
Packing up all these stupid similes.
My rhymes and I are
                          Out.

No doubt can bail me out
From this decision.
Blinded by illusions
Of sincerity
Happy hyperboles of fidelity
Reality
Rips my pages
To shreds.

My personifications are
Dead.
Like my underfed heart.
Part
of me
will remain
As lifeless as this page.

Don’t let my pentameters
Hold you back.
Let my lyrics liberate you.
Revel in this
                                drop
Our rhyme was only ever an end stop.

Here is your conclusion.
Your last allusion
True
Because
No matter what you do,

                                             No girl will ever again write poems for you.

There are some things that science cannot explain
some things cannot be wrapped around the cerebrum
and as it unfolds
we see the earth is 13.8 billion years old.
Thrace down my 100,000 miles of blood before you tell me who I am or what I'm made of.
And although we can see
that Mercury is 799 degrees,
that doesn't help with all the physicistry.
My doctor asks me to stick out my tongue.
I ask if he can see all the pain choked in my throat,
he laughs as if I'm telling a joke,
I'm not.

And although we can produce a light
a million times brighter than the sun
we have problems saying words like please and thank you and love.

I tell my psychiatrist about the sadness that shakes all 206 of my bones
as my cerebellum pulses with ten billion neurons and flashbacks and blood cells and "Post Traumatic Symptom Disorder," because everything has to have a name in science.

So the doctor prescribes Zoloft, and Prozac, and Ability, and Paxil to numb the passion,
But she contradicts with the words,
"Life isn't supposed to make you feel good or bad,
for it is just supposed to make you feel."

Because when my hand is on my chest I feel something there,
A force pumping 100,000 miles of blood across my limbs
filled with broken iambic pentameters, and stars of lust, with music, and sleeping pills, and roses of wonder-
for there are just some things within me that science cannot explain.

And although it can explain my heart bleeding,
It can't define the meaning,
or prescribe what we are needing,
here were assigned ******* seating,
and the teacher explains my uneasy breathing,
but in my head i can't stop the screaming,
and the sciences seems to be fleeting
as they can't explain us meeting,
our minds and eyes so gleaming,
its just the feeling,
when even science can't tell if you're drowning or dreaming,
because these brain cells are fleeting
as there are just some things
science
cannot explain.

might I better feel in prosody
defined by iambic pentameters
or weight of a dactyl or spondee
stress patterns or
a sequence of feet
or is my line enough
a pattern qualifying through
or is emphasis
too often stressed as following
the pattern
of the compulsory

My paper withstands when my hand lands
My wrist understands all my mind’s commands
My paper bans nothing that my heart demands
My pen brands words like a printer scans
My desk stands through my scripted plans

It’s a victimless crime if poems don’t rhyme
To the senses, purely sublime
Literature to be read in double time
But I challenge that, rhyming’s nonsense

Senses can be stimulated
Tantalized and integrated
Articulated, but outdated to the rest of humankind

Words can lift you like breeze lifts leaves in the fall
Switching scheme and theme seems sacrilege after all

Leave your oblique rhymes and iambic pentameters at home, I couldn’t.

Her mind is deeper than the
          Mariana Trench
     And more infinite than
               Outer space
     Even she doesn't know
           The mysteries
            Of her heart
Her heart is the eighth wonder!
              In her thought
       She's an astronaut or a
                 Cosmonaut
               Occasionally
       She's a stargazer or an
                 Astronomer
              At the same time
  She dives into the vast blue
                    Ocean
      She loves scuba-diving
       She cherishes snorkelling
                  Right now
               Her mind is
                      Darkly
                      Cloudy
      ­          But she knows
           Her mind will become
      Stunningly sunny soon
         When she feels alone
        Her heart talks to the
                  Southern wind
      Her heart's sonata is known
                   By nobody
                Her mind contains
                  Poetic imagery
                      Metaphors
                         Similes
                    Alliteration
                Iambic pentameters
                     Nostalgia
                       Conflicts
                         Stimuli
                       Cumulus
                 Inner lexicon
                       And so on
Her heart is as strange as the
                        Universe

Something inside me
just won't let go

There is a prisoner
within

Imagine an orphaned
word in a book

This is what it feels like
right now

Just waiting to be set
free

Trapped by convention
and punctuation

Bracketed by the inertia
of grammar

Correct form, hereditary
obligations

Literary role models
etymology

Stanzas in lines
iambic pentameters

Hyphens semi colons
onomatopoeia's

A palindrome is the
fugitive of language

The only one capable
of escaping, the full stop.

I’m locking away all my metaphors
Packing up all these stupid similes.
My rhymes and I are
                          Out.

No doubt can bail me out
From this decision.
Blinded by illusions
Of sincerity
Happy hyperboles of fidelity
Reality
Rips my pages
To shreds.

My personifications are
Dead.
Like my underfed heart.
Part
of me
will remain
As lifeless as this page.

Don’t let my pentameters
Hold you back.
Let my lyrics liberate you.
Revel in this
                                drop
Our rhyme was only ever an end stop.

Here is your conclusion.
Your last allusion
True
Because
No matter what you do,

                                             No girl will ever again write poems for you.

You are my poetry
and every word I know.
I can write sonnets
about how your lips
speak to my soul,
and I always seem to
carry you inside me
wherever I go.

You are my poetry
lyrical caresses
in my mind.
word spoken
and unspoken,
both horrible
and kind.

You are my poetry
hearts and stars
behind my eyes.
loving you so deeply
took me by surprise.

You are my poetry
pentameters,
verbal description
in panoramic
caricatures.

You are my poetry
because words mean
everything.
you warm me
in the summer,
and renew me
in the spring.

You are my poetry.
loose leaf pages
in the wind.
our beginning,
and alas,
until our bitter end.

You are my poetry.
how more may I describe?
You feed me
and nurture me
and make me
feel alive.