Some people claim to be the Lords of Rhyme
But they use the same syllable for every line
And rhyme that word line after line
And the rhyme just gets boring after a time;

Cheap tricks like that are no good to me
'Cos I like to set my vocabulary free
And stretch my rhymes to infinity
To emphasise my message positively.

The spirit that guides my words to the page
Has been helping rhymers since the prehistoric age

When Imhotep raised his megalith
My guiding spirit rhymed the hieroglyph

And as great Agammemnon stormed the walls of Troy
The Genie helped write the story of a wooden decoy.

In the ruins of Pompeii, drowning in volcanic ash
As Vespasian passed on the Imperial sash

The genie helped craft the latin rhythmus
Anyone blind to the pattern suffers from strabismus.

In the New World; The ziggaurats of Teotihuacán
Are inscribed with the legends of a civilisation

That died before Cortés and his conquistadores
Arrived to impose European Christian mores.

Throughout the renaissance and the age of reason
There were poets writing rhyme for every season

There was Metaphysical, Idealist and Romantic,
The Neo-classicists were more pedantic

Modernists did not write traditionally
But composed their verse unstructured and free

In spite of new philosophies and differences of style
The Rhyming spirit always used his wit and guile

To guide poets through the paradigm
And find a way to make their couplets rhyme. 

  FOOTNOTE: Somebody told a friend of mine in a very condescending way that raps, rants and hip - hop lyrics are not poetry and have no business here. As somebody very highly educated in English Literature I decided to repost this as a way of saying "BRING HIM ON." Rhyme does not belong to a particular style of poetry but can be used any way we like

THE GENIE OF THE COUPLETS