Palimpsest

Prose Disguised As Poetry

All this time

I’ve been fooling myself.

What I thought was poetry

Was simply prose in pieces,

Phrase-able chunks of idle fancy

Reduced to tired sound-bites

That looked pretty on paper.

As poetry,

It ranks a pretty solid F-.

Although, I am my harshest critic.

When looked at through the filter of prose,

It makes more sense.

If you fill in the missing pieces,

It resolves with an odd sort of logic.

Hence, Palimpsest.

You are required to dig beneath the surface,

Get your hands dirty

To find anything of value.

At first glance, my work is

unschooled, undisciplined, underwhelming

and most damning of all,

derivative

But

There is prose hiding under this guise of poetry,

Verse is laid as a veneer over reality.

This is how I see the world.

I apply a veneer of verse

To grief and joy,

To victory and defeat,

To beauty and the ugliness we are capable of

To make them more tolerable.

Where does poetry sit on the functional scale?

Does it make the subject pretty?

Or understandable?

Or more tolerable?

Is all poetry hallucination,

A fever dream of verse

To sooth an anxious brow?

Probably.

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