Sex Stain

No funk in poetry these days, no rhyme
to spare the time, to shape the world in form
or free, just prose, to watch as we die.  Verse,
if I could break your back and with these words
rebuild that stanza lone, you’d feel your feet
were dancing to some dark uncommon beat

I met a poet once, said he was beat
and smoky folk wrapped round him for his rhyme
but gasoline encased his naked feet
and lunch exploded softly on his form
of non-conformist storage of the words
that scattered like the scriptures INRI verse

And in the streets you’ll find the scraps of verse
blown leftwards.  While pedestrians will beat
upon the cracks and crevices where words
can’t help but fall, the vestiges of rhyme
will couple in the alleyways to form
an easement for the stress upon your feet

The tramping stamp of strictly metered feet
sings jackboot threats to liberated verse
where none may pass without the proper form.
Reactionaries shout how they will beat
the dictates of the strict and structured rhyme
and never hear proscription in their words

They are just air and scribbles, all these words
that bring the outraged masses to their feet
and where would protests be, if not for rhyme?
No “hell no, we won’t go”, such clever verse
is owed the witless who think they can beat
the world into a boxed and labelled form

They talk the loudest, those whose lips will form
two trunkless legs to tower over words
from better men.  And time itself will beat
that bitter drum that knocks us from our feet
and leaves us kicking hopelessly at verse
that argues still the right and wrong of rhyme

And fractures form where once we set out feet
in clay, while words from some infectious verse
spray out the beat, in funky naked rhyme.