In My battle with the Intellectual

In my battle with the intellectual

I have always been ineffectual

to the degree I am transparent with rage

just so blindly they offer bilious as sage

they belittle the reader with their pedantry

and quotes themselves oh so preciously

It scraps at my hide to an excess degree

caught between my brightness and ignominy.

    (which I always spell wrong ignomy

     having learnt my spelling but dimly,)

When the scholarly elite write a 3-tome set

and call it a synopsis, I find it so wet

that I can't help but open my sorry YAP

and look like a whiner, ah, there is the trap.

It isn't your blindness I want to explain

it is just when you puff yourself I feel pain

For if of all my disabling traits I were free

that blow-hard/poetry expert/know-it-all would be ME.

The Benefits Package

The Employee Handbook for Poets

by TBO's Dear Tick

The interview is in your hand
it comes out of a book
if you are right for poetry
we will know by the look.

The training is in sestinas
and limericks and sonnets
practicing the basic art
and putting your mark on it.

The pay is made in satisfaction
occasionally a fan
and the hatred that is generated
by makers of evil plans.

The prize is in a roses core
a delicate half op'ed thing
when grit and glory congregate
and your wildest joys take wing.

Vacation pay is the daily grind
that pulls you from your work
the pension plan is memories
to the last, you did not shirk.

Please Do Not Apologize

Please Do Not Apologize

by I Am Your Friend



I do not apologize for breathing air
I cannot be any other way
If you cannot check yourself
I can accept that
But to apologize
for things you will never change
Is an insult, and not an apology.


I am your friend
I love you, I forgive you
But please, please,
don't apologize.

Call me Frankenstein, or the difference between a tweek and a drub?

I am furious
Writing in a vacuum
When Joe says
"I love you like a summer's eve"

And I make douche jokes
The audience thinks I am the douche.

When Jane says
"I seduced my prison guard"
And I say "bars cannot a window make"
The audience says
"Hail Shakespeare, go peddle your wares elsewares."

I want to disinvent the pen.
Create a chamber, made to torture
any who claim the name poet
to have to hear their own work 5000 times
until they KNOW it is dreck.

But, the only pen's graveyard
Is trying to make my thoughts known;
The only poet's torture chamber
Is pointing out egregious flaws.
And getting told "Mine was better"

[Of course yours wad of wet fur was better:
If I could taxidermy rot & get the live animal
Call me Frankenstein, I'd call this amateur crap quits!*]

*And then some flatterer will eat my Dahlmer sandwich
and say it tastes like fresh basil and caviar.

Words are the source of all misinformation.