"A stubborn little problem here to stay / Spinning my end-rhymes here in your end-times / All I would like is to be of some use / I think I wrote six sonnets yesterday"

Alien in an Alien Nation

Something of a freak and bearing the beak
Of an ancient aquiline bird of prey
Hidden hand hidden from a hidden land
Alien in an alien nation
A strange bird indeed in a stranger day
Controversy and a consternation
Picking through the ruins and the refuse

Though I am small and meek I dare to speak
Many would prefer that I go away
An odd little survivor of abuse
A stubborn little problem here to stay
Spinning my end-rhymes here in your end-times
All I would like is to be of some use
I think I wrote six sonnets yesterday

My poetry is considered formal
Rhymed and metrical timed and technical
Quite unusual even abnormal
Diversity in specificity
Works well for me though many disagree
They do not like me or at least not yet
In fact dislike me to puzzling degree

They find me to be disagreeable
Voting my books down on the Internet
Voting their conscience vociferously
Bankrupting me with glee and no regret
Apparently they misunderstand me
I find my future unforeseeable
But understood or not I choose to be

They say the formal does not go down well
Some are not subtle they cannot stand me
I seem to offend quite personally
Their intolerant spontaneity
A worse offense to free verse dense with meaning
Which irritates the normal all to hell

They say poems on poetry do not sell
But you are reading me now (how do you do)
How am I doing now and how about you?
My antique structures could be used as cleaning
Tools that fools like me might serve some purpose yet
That we might clean prosaic clocks lest time forget

+Steven Curtis Lance



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