I'll take the one less traveled by -

I don’t like poetry. Well that isn’t exactly true; I can appreciate good poetry, it’s just that most of it (with some obvious exceptions; Dante, Poe, etc.) is not good. I only like verse that rhymes (sue me) or at the very least has a solid rhythm. Too many of these long flowery sonnets are like bad run-on sentences, full of convoluted metaphors that cause my mind to wander (do I want a salad or a Shamrock Shake for lunch…hmmm?). Other reasons I don’t dig on poetry:

1) At a poetry reading in high school, a friend of my sister read a personal poem about her uncle molesting her on a boat as a child. Everyone clapped and told her she was a marvelous writer. I wanted to call child services.

2) At the age of nine I wrote a color poem for school. In fact, it is the only poem I can remember writing and it is therefore burned into my brain to forever mock any writing ability I think I have.

Blue is the color of sadness and woe
Blue is a color in the rainbow
Blue is the feeling you get when you cry
Blue is the teardrop that falls from your eye

I wasn’t a depressed fourth-grader, I swear, blue is just less lame than white clouds and pink bunnies.

3) Who is this "man form Nantucket" and why is that the only line ever used from this infamous limerick? Is it too risqué to recite in its entirety (I can see some dangerous rhyming potential) or does the phrase have some meaning that has nothing to do with a New England man but instead speaks toward some life lesson? This is not a rhetorical question - I really want to know.

4) An old boyfriend was assigned to write a haiku for class. Being the typical love-sick teen, he wrote it about me:

static attraction
her hair in my face
tastes like love

Perhaps I should have swooned like any good adolescent girl whose boyfriend wrote her a love poem, but mostly I was annoyed that he was going to get a crap grade because it was obviously not a haiku (5-7-5 about nature) and that his D- was going to be earned in my honor. Bleh. (It didn’t help his case that he presented his poem to me on a post-it note. I tell you, kids these days just don’t understand romantic gestures.) Of course, it is the only poem a boy has written for me; I suppose that is why I still remember it.

5) Why, when reading poetry, do poets make their voices go up at the end of each line as though the poems are full of questions? (un-knowing? un-loving? un-love…ed?) Are there no declarative sentences in poetry?

My verse of choice is accompanied by an electric guitar not bongo drums - everyone loves good lyrics.

- lada still has miles to go before she sleeps