"Caliban must have dinner."
Let him have first a bit of scansion
Of the vowels marooned to his feet
Along with the consonants washed ashore
By a called up mock storm
Inhabited by catalectic trochaic Trimeter, hexameter or pentameter
Name it !
This muse is his.
For his is the muse
This muse is his island
And every storm of hers is a beatitude
Passed on him by his  Sycorax.
So blessed is Caliban
For his is the musedom of light
This muse is a perfect antilabe
He has pampered her with caesurae
He has spoiled her with feminine
Stressed and unstressed syllables
Kissed her with iambic pentameter
Caressed her with hemistichs
A trochee here
A spondee there
Caliban is beatitude in scansion.
Blessed is Caliban
For his is the musedom of  light.

Poems need not be sad
Or angry or mad
With endless lines that go on and on and on and on and on about broken homes an broken hearts
And false starts
That painfully chart
The awkward writer
From darker to brighter...

No, instead they can start
With a poetry ****
Pure expression, release
Once out they bring peace
Just put words on a page
Don’t think, just engage
They don’t have to be long
And they don’t even have to be rhythmically strong
Short or ugly or loud,
Will do just fine, that’s allowed
As long as you write
With all of your might
Let go
Of the words
Let them flow!

Get rid of what’s stuck
In a head full of muck
Let them out and they’ll bake
You a metaphorical cake
That does what you need it to do
Even if it’s not good enough for a national poetry competition because the scansion’s all wrong

With generosity of time and care
He teaches her about the things he knows.
Such as a couplet is a rhyming pair
And how a sonnet ought to be composed.
Pentameter iambic is the key
With accents, syllables and scansion too.
It seems a huge and baffling mystery
But bit by bit he gives a hint. A clue.
“It helps to tap your fingers on the desk
To count the syllables and hear the beat.
For some this seems bizarre and quite grotesque
But listen hard and count along. It’s sweet!”
          A teacher true who cares for flawless rhyme
          I thank you friend for giving me your time.

No matter how
You may attempt
To grow out
The container
Of your life
Which was provided for you.

There are others
Who weigh you down?
With the weight
Of their ideas.

Empty the bowl
Continue to reach
Through your roots depthless
In the soil of your speaking
And then from your hand.
May sprout the words
With green leaf script
Growing up the scansion
Of the stars.

For in the gleaning
Of bonsai
The tiny and insignificant
Are magnified
For burden’s elegance

Is Refinement
The smoothness of the soul.
For what is compact
Is always whole.

the criminal element is lost
have you fought with your boss
each day is fraught with challenges
but that's what makes you stronger
all along the water's edge
the waves break and connect
like threads of poetry
lines of beauty
curving at the moon
luminous intrusions
before we are fallen
dreams seethe
with colorful landscapes
and i am a blade of grass

threads of astral fire
aspire for the sun
my magic is beyond recognition
it ignites the silence
and burns bright as day
words are living
breathing entities
families of sounds
consonants and vowels
are relatively harmless
unless you dare
to speak them out loud
control your tone
and let aspiration resonate
this assonance is rather transient
so lets embrace our scansion
mansions of impermanence
lands of intransigent transients
its tragic really
how the lead of vehemence
can spread so rapidly

sentient powers stake their claim
in soil that remains dutiful
despite your shame
have we gone insane
its quite likely
or are we still the same
that remains to be questioned
better to drop this game
and keep up your crazy vision quest

Laid now on his smooth bed
For the last time, watching dully
Through heavy eyelids the day's colour
Widow the sky, what can he say
Worthy of record, the books all open,
Pens ready, the faces, sad,
Waiting gravely for the tired lips
To move once -- what can he say?

His tongue wrestles to force one word
Past the thick phlegm; no speech, no phrases
For the day's news, just the one word ‘sorry';
Sorry for the lies, for the long failure
In the poet's war; that he preferred
The easier rhythms of the heart
To the mind's scansion; that now he dies
Intestate, having nothing to leave
But a few songs, cold as stones
In the thin hands that asked for bread.

Freedom is existence, growth and persistence enacted through nonviolence such as passive resistance.

Freedom is expansion, past the bounds of your mind's mansion, to evolve with the environment like verses without scansion.

To revel in the expansion of your own spatial existence is like how treble leaves you dancing as the bass is Doppler shifting.

To enjoy the state of living in your temporal position is the very definition of the joy of manumission.

Lost in the scansion of a cool iron box
I struggle for air from the confines of metal that blocks all fresh of life from the cage
Bound in gagged suffocated reflexes
I utter muffled screams of my nights spent in lost days

Held in suspended motion, mid-flight to a descent
I train myself, my senses already know what comes next
meanwhile the art of stillness, in vivid stasis I contemplate.

Brevity is the soul  of wit
parody is the spirit of zombie
or the lack thereof--
as they scratch through the scansion.

Parody arise from
its grave hungry
stalking  through  the letters of  trees
until it comes
to cabin isolated in the backwoods.

Batter through the three doors
of the stanza
and then eat the children
of another’s poem.

Slouching...

                   From an idea suggested by Robert Graves in
                                       On English Poetry

I. Thesis

Formalist poetry to attention stands
In ordered meters, ranks and files and lines
Of scansion as determined by disciplined minds
And set in place through skillful strategy

II. Antithesis

Other poetry slouches indolently, insolently with its louche trilby askew
Sleeping late, smoking cigarettes,
                                                     sauntering off
                                                                ­              for a beer
Through scansion as admitted by the heart or the pancreas or something
And seldom set in place at all unless it just sort of happens

III. A Perhaps Unnecessary but Useful Conjunction

But

IV. Synthesis

All poems ramble the same neighborhood
In quest of the true, the beautiful, the good

Ma Diva veut  être meublée de parenthèses
De ïambes de jade meuble aux couleurs de toutes les toques
Et manches et casaques de l 'arc-en-ciel
Toque blanche manches vertes et casaque noire,
Toque rose manches blanches et casaque verte.

A l'intérieur des petites lunes enchantées
Entre losanges, étoiles et petits pois
Ma diva, oh la vilaine,  a mis des accolades et des crochets
De jade blanc, digressions  ponctuées périodiquement
Par d'exquises parties de ïambes en l'air.

Qui dit ïambe dit trochée
(me suis-je permis de préciser)
Et qui dit ïambe et trochée dit scansion
Alternance dans le pied, donc dans la marche
Dans le pas cadencé, l 'amble, le trot  et le galop
De la respiration longue et brève des solipèdes.

A l 'intérieur des parenthèses enchantées
Entre une espace et l 'autre de l 'écurie
J'ai vu danser ainsi une diva de forte encolure
Revendiquée modèle de Botero
Embarquer en longe un soleil pas trop chaud
Pour égayer le paddock de son haras
De vieilles pierres et de prés, de sous-bois et de beaux paysages
De musées et de concerts et de galipettes
Au bras d'un cavalier épicurien
Dragon de paille, bon à tout faire :
Lad qui la sorte à la longe
En chemise polaire de luxe
Cavalier qui la monte
Au grand steeple-chase de l'immortalité
En cajolant ses flancs de liqueur de jade blanche
Et  en même temps  groom qui la soigne
En divaguant en elle au gré de ses envies
De pierre semi-précieuse en transe.

I am Bic Pentameter
Bic Pentameter is my name
Rhythm is my business
Time management is my game

Short, Long & Sons employ me
To tidy up their verse
The satirists are not too bad
But Catullus is a curse

I have danced with Sappho
Brought Shakespeare home for tea
Swapped pretty tales with Byron
Bounced da Padova on my knee

Marlowe picked a fight for nought
Auden spiked my drink
Wordsworth was insomnolent
He never slept a wink

Yeats, now there's an anecdote
Worthy of the press
The critic's choice by all accounts
The brightest and the best

But listen to me prattling on
To my work I must attend
Performance, prosody, poesy
The rules of scansion do not bend

For metre is all important
When reciting off by heart
The classic works of yesteryear
And I shall play my part

Poems are an odd business:
an idea,
a concept,
it slips into your mind
and all of a sudden
there are words
that describe it,
it’s present,
it’s past,
sometimes it’s future.
these words have to have
rhythm and scansion,
the syllables must sound right,
the words must sound right,
the lines must be right,
the silences in between
must sound right,
just using words.

It is more than building with bricks and mortar;
these are fixed known things,
but poems
come into existence
like flashes of lightning
that light the sky,
they are there
and then they are not there,
you have to be quick
to catch them before they fade,
and leave you in the dark
with no words on paper.

I'll sing for you a symphony
    and strum the strings in beats
    an inspired grandiose melody
    of lifelong rhapsody entirely
    four movements my heart completes.

I'll sing for you a chanson
    full of lyrics affecting and pure
    my solo voice defies easy scansion
    to develop an embracing expansion
    admiration is mine to ensure.

I'll sing for you an anthem
    devotion to you alone
    your sacred being beyond fathom
    ardent, I'm held for ransom
    devotion to cherish and own.

I'll sing for you a love song
    every word flows right and true
    to croon an acoustic-filled levity
    with a phrase ensured in brevity
    for your heart I will win anew.

Whenever I begin to write a verse,
   I rarely know quite how the work will end;
I try to keep my subjects somewhat terse
   and use the form to make the scansion bend.
I find the meaning somewhere halfway through
   the writing process, where it's leading me;
and try my utmost not to overdo
   the metaphors and sappy imag'ry
(for sentimental verse we hardly lack
   among the countless writings of our time).
I speak of love, but more so I stay back
   and think of other matters for to rhyme,
and when I reach the end and writing's done,
it's not long ere the next work is begun.

when it's time to write the words again
they come one by one
filing in through an opening,
it might be that they've waited patiently
for a right time or an invitation
but not always
I like it best when they rush in, fervently needing attention

hearing them coming, I
lift my head
and with a certain kind of tightness in the belly
begin to place them quickly,
carefully
in order or progression, to
ensure that for the reader,
they carry meaning

from time to time I
go back to the beginning of a line
and review the order
review the syntax
the scansion
the metre
or perhaps re-order or re-use or remove one or two
as necessary

repetition can be a feature of this process
as sometimes words
want to come in twos, pairs
or repeated phrases,
to create emphasis;

and of the words upon arrival
I marvel as they move a line
to connect and weave and work to
lift from the page a story

as a poem
as a promise
as a possibility