Note to Readers: If JK is your favorite poet, or you are, perhaps, a relative of him, go no further: I really don't need the hatemail. If, on the other hand, you enjoy satire -- read on!
Ode to Joyce Kilmer
You were my first formal introduction to poetry.
Me: so young and impressionalbe,
You: the quintessential poet,
And
"I think that I shall never see
"A poem as lovely as a tree"
the purported perfect poem.
And now, as a man who has lived long enough
to see through so many of the truths
I was taught as a child,
I must ask you:
Just who the hell do you think you are?
Do you have any idea the extent of the damage you
and your pansy-assed little poem have caused?
In two lines you convinced whole generations
of potential Shakespeares
that their efforts would be wasted.
You said,
"You might as well give it up, folks,
"'cause you'll never do better than this!"
Well, listen, you smirking ego-bloated self-appointed
guru of the short sighted,
don't you know that man invented God?
And if gods are all powerful, all knowing,
then we can do anything!
Hey, I've got nothing against trees!
But show me a tree
that can suck you inside itself
with the sweet scent of its blossoms,
that exposes to your eye the beauty beneath the bark,
that pulls you, gasping,
through the twisting structure of its roots
and shoots you straight up the middle
and pushes you out to the end
of each of its mighty, gnarled limbs
and lets you see the world from its lofty height --
a tree that can make you laugh and lust
and scream and cry
all in the same breath,
a tree that strips you bare,
a tree that reveals the very nature of the universe,
a tree that bears more succulent fruit,
morsels of truth and beauty forever ripe
dangling from a thousand boughs
and each within reach of a single outstretched hand!
I've had your miserable little poem locked in my head
for thirty years or more,
enshrined as some great irrefutable truth --
but no more!
I call on all the poets,
the bards and balladeers,
the living and the dead,
the famous and the bathroom scrawlers,
the coupleteers and dactyl doers,
the blank versers, the rhymers, the limerickites,
the eliptical and obvious,
I call upon them all to rise up!
I call them to come howling, with pitchforks and clubs,
to come screaming to your grave
and rip you from the earth!
We will tear your mangy corpse into ribbons
and pound your bones into dust
not even the wind can find!
We will piss into your coffin --
Stripped naked, we will dance wild, unnameable
frenzied jigs upon your stone
and spin and twirl to mad stentorian tunes
beneath a blazing poets' moon!
We will sing holy and insane songs,
holding hands as one,
and we will skip and laugh and weep for out freedom!
And when, at last, we have emptied the world of you,
we will sit around the massive crater where you were, and
one by one
we will cast tiny nuggets of stars into that great hole,
and we will cover it tenderly
with the rich soil of our minds,
and we will water it with tears,
and weed it with imagination,
and we will stand back slightly with proud, mad grins
plastered to our faces,
breathing like freight trains --
And we will see the birth of a great and mighty
endless forest,
the likes of which
no god has ever seen!
END
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Okay, let the hatemail come. I know I go overboard sometimes -- okay, most of the time. I would never actually disturb the grave of anyone, much less one of our own kind. Besides, I would probably get arrested. My apologies, JK: mea culp, mea culpa, mea culpa. But there is a point here, and I think even Mr. Kilmer would see it. Perhaps he wouldn't applaud, but I think he just might smile -- a little.
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My Best That's Not Too Hot
PoetryA collection of my best poetry that's not too adult to get an R rating