The Diddy and Al Capone Gnomes

  The Diddy and Al Capone Gnomes

That leper, poetry, is exiled now
To margins of the world, especially if 
Its lines are rhymed and rhythmed.  Fat hausfrau
Is how it’s viewed.  It’s found to have a whiff
Of corpse which seems to be like dried up crap.
Now much preferred is diarrhea on
The page.  Such rhyminng turds, turds, turds as rap
Are worshipped.  Truer poetry is yawn
Among the young.  Unless the rhyme is slung
With bang and violence and drugs — and shit
Like that — the youths think boredom has been flung
At them.  They’d rather rhyme with cock-raped clit.
  Bang, thud, bang, thud their rhythm and their rhyme
    Go, adding up to verse’s gangland crime.

Phillip Whidden