Any Other Name
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 doesn’t quite make the grade.
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
Over 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 soothe an anxious brow?
It’s probably just
Prose disguised as poetry.
Palimpsest 
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