On Rhyming Poetry

by Brett Rutherford

     A parody of Barbara Holland’s “Black Sabbat”,

     upon the occasion of being forced

     to listen to doggerel)

Thou shalt not suffer a rhyme
     to live;
thou shalt not suffer a rhyme.

for rhymes are tedious
merely in their existence.

Four hundred years ago you
     bored us on the page,
now in this steel-stitched century
     you tease us!

Often I have been aware of you,
of your comings and goings
     at the end of the line,
but it was not until I saw
     the pack of you,
a word-snarl of mouthing lips,
bloated with overscanning,
count-fingering, thumbs in the heart
of a rhyming dictionary —
drinking the blood of a line
that was good by accident
in the gray wet light of high school ...

until I saw you fawning before
that goat-headed one
to whom you pledged Art
on pain of strangulation —

Desist! No more. Some poems
may walk the railroad track of verse,
but do not call your hammered-rhyming
thing a Poem. Begone, gadfly! Shut up,
you sledgehammer-pile-driving woodpecker!