Two poets roasting each other (in the classical tradition of elegant verbal combat): Poet A (the Romantic, all moonlight and sighs): Your meter limps like a three-legged dog in the rain, Your metaphors collapse under their own cheap weight. You call it “truth,” I call it recycled pain— A diary entry dressed up as literature, late. Your rhymes are the sound of a dying typewriter’s last breath, And your “depth” is just the shallow end of a very small pool. Poet B (the Modernist, all concrete and contempt): Ah, the professional cloud-gazer speaks. How touching. Your stanzas are perfume sprayed on a corpse of feeling— All “O! the night!” and “alas, my fragile heart is clutching” While actual language goes unpaid and unreeling. You write as if the twentieth century never happened, A lace handkerchief waving at a tank. Poet A: And you write as if beauty itself were a war crime. Your poems are scaffolding with the building missing. All jagged edges and deliberate anti-rhyme— A manifesto that forgot to bring the living. Poet B: Better scaffolding than your endless soft-focus fog. At least when I break a line, it stays broken on purpose. You still think a sunset is a personal dialogue Between God and your unfinished manuscript. Both, simultaneously, with perfect mutual disdain: At least I still believe the page can bleed. At least I stopped pretending the wound needs a rhyme.
