Most Poetry Does not Rhyme

    Either way, I have difficulties with poetry.

    When I hear it, I have things in it that I do not understand or hear right.

    Some things sound wrong or I object to what I think I understood.

    It happened Sunday morning when I heard my wife read Billy Collins' poem about poetry.

    Meta-poetic. 

    Putting a "hive to your ear"; that got me. I was stuck. Then other parts of the poem, my beautiful spouse across from me, recanting, reciting, the Poem of the Laureate.

    Me, stuck in the silly hive on the ear. A bee hive? What? 

    Is that poetry? Foolish stings and pain to the face?

    No, I declaim!

    I am thinking that diacritically I maybe am a semi-colon and an interrogative.

    Not a period, not an exclamation. Point.

    Not a full colon.

    Diacritics.

    Within the languages of poetry.

    Poetry in Chinese and Sanskrit.

    Persian, Farsi, or Amharic. What else in Ethiopia?

    All the languages, the native American ones dying off.

    Or perhaps the weird ones of Papua New Guinea.

    What do they speak in the Andamans?

    It is not written, they are truly savages, in the non-racist sense. 

    The Andaman islanders do not welcome the rest of us.

    Almost poetic, really.

    Kit Marlowe or William Shakespeare? The son of the cobbler or the son of the glover?

    Did the real bard die by age twenty-nine? Perhaps he was skewered by Skeres.

    Rodney Bolt is so hard to read.

    But I do it.

    Prose about poets.

    "History Play."

    And none of that rhymed.

    And this, my friends, is not normal poetry.

    Barnes and Noble does not have it.

    But maybe someday.

    This poetry might sing.

    What?

    Billy Collins is all right. Maybe it is me.

    Me and the oratory tradition. 

    Prose, too. I have issues with listening.

    I see it on paper, on a screen, and I can understand it better.

    Then, there is other languages.

    Oof.

    I can do pretty well in Spanish. Portuguese, not bad, really.

    French/ It