Free Verse

I stand here
Microphone in hand
A sheaf of poetry sitting at home in a notebook
Battered, worn, with mocha stains blurring the harsh pen strokes
Weak rhymes and worse meter, holding syllable after syllable
Trapped in horrible archaic conventions, behind bars
Imprisoned like a common thug
Bars of blue, as strong as steel, forcing words to bend, against their will
Conforming to rules created by long dead European males
Can words be fettered so?

Does the ability to match two disjointed words,
Whose only similarity is the sound of their final syllable
The last few letters of a bastard language created by the forced mating of all too many mother tongues
Does that somehow bring out some deeper meaning
Or is it just the final bitter act of a man
Unable to prove his cleverness in speech
Making up rules in which no once can express their feelings.

Picture a Ronin.
Counts out every syllable
Masterless Samurai
Add two lines. seven beats each
Haiku becomes a Tanka

Did he say in that short constrained speech the agony he felt upon the death of his master, his lord
Did he scream to the heavens and the hells the anguish he would endure
For every heartbeat, pushing all too living blood throughout his body

Five beats, Seven, Five
His heart a haiku of life
Flowers in Winter

No.
Words contained so, do not have the raw ferocity and power
They are like lions in the zoo, performing in the circus
Stamping around in their cages of 8 and 1/2 by 11 paper
Doing clever tricks for the amusement of the audience
They are but dim shadows of their true self
Fierce hunters of the Serengeti, daring some clever European Male
To find anything that rhymes with Kilimanjaro
That is even a shadow of it's own magnificence.

Words howl, roar, cry, scream, and rend the shackles of the mind with their raw power
And having made the kill, wander off into the night.
Never to be seen again.
Only the tame words
Living in their trained Circuses, like animated Simba's performing for our amusement
Those we see again and again
Constrained words repeating over in over in lyrics from a Disney animated feature
They sit in our mind, grasping to our brain for dear life
Lying Kings, whom we pay for the dimming of our own intelligence
No nobleness in the words and yet for the howling of the Def Lepards we ignore the true predators
And pay money for each CD, each tape containing ballad after ballad of insipid rhyme
Created from the once free words that we now purchase with our hard earned cash
Cash, Money, Dough, Paycheck, Salary, WAGE
WAGE against the dying of this poet's light.

If I only had the power to show their beauty
To reach through the bars and break them out.
Like some common Thug, branded for life as a hoodlum, a gangster,
a low life scum littering the streets of conversation
Proving that behind the scarred flesh is a free mind capable of rational coherent thought
Slamming out the harsh bitter truth, forcing words like fists into the faces of unyielding minds

Jamming, Slamming, Cramming the disjointed, pointed lessons, stressing, keeping them guessing, messing with their mind, time after time, showing the crime, that rhyme after rhyme, although fine, lacks the sublime. a lion, not dying, but trying, and buying us the dream that we scream, lean, mean, making us see, that we're free, you and me, for all eternity, so mote it be.