Perpetually in Spondaic Love with T.S. Eliot

This poem/rant occurred when I was reading a book of Yeats' that was my roommate's text in college. I grew weary of his notations (although they were very insightful) and decided to combat responses on poetry in the best way I know how--responding with more poetry.

They fuck you up, your Mom and Dad--

for sending you to a college to get a liberal arts education to learn about Philip Larkin and other angry British men.

That’s what they, and the entire college of arts and humanities, have done to me by attempting to broaden my right brain and its horizons.

It’s a section of my cranium, not the Manifest Destiny.

I’ve been taught to write how I feel, because ‘that’s what I know’.

But all of a sudden, it’s like diffusing a trochaic bomb.

I don’t do iambic pentameter or hexameter unless they’re the questions for Double Jeopardy answers.

What is ‘poetry is annihilated’ Alex Trebek?

Sometimes I imagine the sheer amount of minutes and hours I’ve wasted deciphering the rhyme scheme in repeating letter patterns, ABAB, CDCD, like some savant with alphabet OCD

Petrarchian and Shakesperian sonnets should just get over themselves and bang already.

Stressed/unstressed syllables—fuck it, I’m always stressed

I’ve ruined beautiful texts (and lost book deposits) by illustrating poems with chicken scratch hieroglyphic symbols above words.

Even blank verse and free verse classifications box me into arenas guarded by snarling bulldogs named Emily Dickinson and Tennyson.

I even hate myself for committing this rant to text because there’s always the chance it will get highlighted and have notes in the margin in some $75 anthology they made you buy because it would enlighten your soul. (I’d like that, now wouldn’t I?)

T.S. Eliot got me. “No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job” he says.

I’m a woman who wants to do a mediocre job because writing a good poem will destroy me.

Perhaps T.S. and I will make sweet love in the Wasteland with all the other hallow men and women.

T.S. and I will be two completely unstressed syllables stressed out by everything around us.

We’ll walk together like two metrical feet in shoes that won’t lace.