Thursday, September 20, 2012

Another Poem Rejected

I've been writing poetry since I was in my early teens, and I have a folder full of rejection slips. Cyphers magazine sent back this poem today, with a printed form rejection. Not the first time they've rejected one of my poems. I thought it was fairly good. Maybe I'm handicapped by not writing obscure free verse.

The poem is meant to be puckish and provocative; of course women write all sorts of poems. But sometimes it seems like they only write about love.

The Feminine Muse

When a girl sits down to write a poem
She usually writes about love.
Girls write about other things, of course--
About everything in the universe--
But when a girl tells you she's written a poem
It's usually about love.

A man will write lots of different things--
He writes about rising above
The nine-to-five, or submitting to it;
He writes about how he doesn't fit;
He writes about his fancies and flings,
But girls write poems about love.

A man may write about Katy or Kim,
Stanzas and stanzas of stuff.
They'll have her name at the top, to be sure,
But they tend to be more about him than her
And the passions that she provokes in him;
But girls write poems about love.

A man may write poems about poison gas
And wealth going hand-in-glove
With the war machine, but all his rage
Is a little like Hamlet strutting on stage
And while he buffs up his looking glass
The girls write poems about love.

Oh, girls write novels of horror and crime
And plays that show life is tough
And tracts full of erudite reasoning
And books about any and everything
But when they sit down to write lines that rhyme
Girls usually write about love.

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