You are hereby put on notice that as of this date (Tuesday, June 8th in The Year of Our Lord, 2010) that I, Tom Lyford, do willfully and forcibly wrest (from the General Public at large) and seize control of... the honorable title of Poetic Dictator (of Dover-Foxcroft) For Life!! Yes... that's correct: As of now... I proclaim...
that iamb... (yeah... me!) the self-appointed,Poet Laureate of Dover-Foxcroft...
OK, see, I've grown weary of this I'm- nobody-who-are-you? existence! And I'm sick and tired of singing them Poe Me Blues all the time! I just can't go on telling myself over and over that it'll happen psalm day in the near future. So...I will HOWL about this no longer! All I want is my due... you know, to be paid what I believe I'm ode! Here's what I say: Go after Fate and dare to meter face-to-face, by God! Seriously, I really want to accent that! You may be saying, "Oh, that Tom Lyford... he's a monomaniac, anapest to boot!
Any attempts to foil this long overdue coup will be dealt with swiftly and without mercy! For every such action there will be dire consonances! So lay down your weapons, Dover-Foxcroftians! Cease and desist! Refrain! Resistance is futile! You'll never succeed in penetrating my trimeter perimeter! Your rhyme schemes will never work against me! Wit will flash incindiarily in your pastoral streets, and the the thunder of onomatopoeia will roll repetitively through the valley like a vile villanelle! Line after line of my rank and file in phalanxes will descend on you in couplets and quatrains like a plague... I'll blast your feminine endings, your weak rhymes to Shakespearean shrapnel... and by Frost, the verse I'll be firing won't be ll blank either! My foot will kick your assonance back to the Stone Age! Oh, it'll be epic!
Face it, John... you're all Donne and you know it!
It's really not the end of the world though, you know...? I mean, I'm not all that bad, am I? Oh, I've written some duds, I guess, but every now and then I've hit a Homer or three out of the park... No, seriously... I'm not Sandberging you here, I swear! Go ahead... do a Thoreau search-- who else in town has a poetry website (which has a Dover-Foxcroft collection on it, by the way) and has published five chapbooks and one large collection? Well, OK: so I don't do haiku so hot, but I promise... you'll really get your Wordsworth with me at the helm. And it's not like I'll make any money at it... there won't be any more jingle to my pockets, after all.
Anyway... sorry about all the tercet remarks I just made and everything... but my proclamation still stands... I'm planting the Laureate flag atop Dover-Foxcroft's highest peak...
Just... please...don't make me take out my poetic license, and use it, OK?
(Secretly... I'd rather you not examine it too closely and read everything that's sonnet!)