Vocabulary Amusement

I think we poets can take ourselves way too seriously. Sometimes we forget that the reason we like poetry is because we like words. We like how they sound, how they're put together, how they sound together, what they mean. Sometimes we use language because we think it sounds poetic. Sometimes we force rhymes, sometimes we force words.

The more I write, the less of these kinds of mistakes I make. Like all things, poetry takes practice. The poems I write today are not as good as the ones I'll write tomorrow and they are better then the ones I wrote yesterday.

Mostly, poetry is supposed to be fun. I have fun writing my poems with heavy themes and with meaning and passion and love. Poems where I choose all my words carefully and slave over the final drafts and constantly rewrite and revise and edit. These are things a serious poet should do, and, while i certainly enjoy doing this-- I like seeing my poems get better and I like seeing my words say exactly what i want them to say-- i thought it would be fun to write a poem that used a bunch of big words and a few rhymes. i wanted to write a poem that "sounded" poetic, but really had no deeper meaning then me, the author's amusement with words. Nonsense poetry is a nice release, I've discovered, and I used to write it a long time ago. here's one I wrote now and it's good to be back.

Enjoy!

Pungent vociferous Viking man

Laughing oddly at the rapidly growing moose brains

Eating heads and drinking blood

From the skulls of reindeer

With fur coats of gargantuan orangutan proportion

Raping and pillaging and tearing asunder

Magic man, spinning awe and wonder

Cattle fish cut vice grip flap jack

Wearing polish Armani sausage hats

And necrophiliac ants and frizzy

Nappy headed grease farms of juxtaposed vision quests

Reigning supreme with the Cherokee

The chickadee

The Choctaw and Sacajawea’s breasts

Milk white and firm

Pulled from a hat

Rabbit like

Tales spun in the depths of night

Drunk on anti-freeze frostbite gin and marijuana

Dancing naked in the moonlight while the wolverines watch

And the cougars courageously laugh and smirk

Amidst swarming cantaloupes and lizard brains making stew to cure tuberculosis and psychosis

Fuckingcattlewreckingball

Munchingweedybucketface

Playfuljunglecatshitstorm

Californication has us

By the toes,

Slimy with jam.

all rights reserved. Copyright Justin W. Price, November 2011.