"This shit is NOT poetry!"

After a week shortened

by illness--mine--and reading

that students were

shocked/saddened/confused/pissed off

by my singular

absence,

and after having to define

pungent, urgent, discern,

rectitude, rectify, stupefy,

fortified, fixated, elixir,

elliptical, circumstantial, radiate,

lethargy, diligence, chronic,

indifferent, austere, and--for good measure,

and by no invention of my own--

sloppy, as in, "You mean, like

she's got sloppy shit?"

and after explaining

that retarded is verboten

(but, of course,

without using verboten),

and why,

and after defending

poor Robert Hayden

whose shit can NOT be poetry

because it don't even rhyme,

I find myself

on my deck

in my backyard

nursing straight orange juice,

my naked face phototropically

following the late afternoon sun, dreaming

of faraway cabana boys, bottomless

buckets of beer,

and thinking,

Man, he was right:

This shit is not poetry.

There is nothing

here that suggests rhyme, not
now, not

never.