Rhymes Long for What They Can’t Be

Staggering back and forth
Between innumerable tricks
On limited topics

And homogeneous
Landscapes of bland language spilling
Out to far horizons,

The god of formal verse
Is dying of drink and bragging
In cities of gunfire.

Fast rappers and sleepy
Creative writing professors
Lifting their inflections

At the end of printed
Lines half hiccuped by enjambments
Have this much in common—

It’s an era of force
And therefore of forced poetry.
Forced rhymes, forced breaks in lines,

Force-flagged surveyor stakes
Measuring out identities,
Verses chalking bodies.

Leave off me, sobs the god
Of prosody. I want to be
Alone, but rhymes can’t be.