VincennesVoice.com

Sean Dempsey

The Prose and the Poet

 

As Prose and Poet fought within me

Alliterations lashed, sibilance slew,

And the metaphors sent smaller words to die; generals in the field.

Contractions, I mustn’t forget, can’t and won’t fight.

 

The rhymes were forced, of course.

Adverbs struggled mightily to support their predicates,

Pulling double duty supporting maddeningly lazy adjectives.

And the fragmented sentences…

 

These, of course, were no match for the run-on sentences

which just as I thought were about to end continued to fight

on through the battle of poetry and grammar

wasting not a chance to get in yet another jab

or joke at the expense of my teachers

and learned men and women in the writing field

who were not actually involved in the wordly battlefield in my mind at

this moment in time.

 

Finally, the punctuations had had enough.

“Stop it!” the exclamation point exploded.

“Can’t we all just get along?” inquired the question mark.

“Yes, we must all join together,” nodded the parenthesis (though they

were actually enjoying themselves).

“You must all be careful, for, ‘The pen is mightier than the sword,’ ”

Cited the quotes.

“This is now over.” Period.

 

 

 

Sean Dempsey is a LHS, VU and ISU graduate. He works and lives in Terre Haute.

 

 

 

 

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