Hate Poetry

I remember reading a lot of poetry in high school. Poetry units were good because poems are usually short. However, discussions usually centered around a group of teenagers pretending they had some clue from whence the specter didst come.

Obviously, if you wanted the girls to like you, you had to pose like some sort of deep thinker; pondering the deeper meaning of Emily Dickinson's darkness. I always pretended like I got poetry*, but even as a good student of language, I didn't get poetry too much beyond dirty limericks.

*Except haikus. No one got haikus and no one even pretended to. It's my personal feeling that art shouldn't include a person sitting at his desk, flicking his fingers to count syllables. Everyone who has ever written a haiku is a finger-flicker. Don't even pretend like that's not true.

Anyway, in my days, I've seen a lot of poetry, most of it considered by others to be good poetry. I've never been a good judge of what makes great poetry. I think it's all pretty good and I'm fine with it; unless it's really, really bad, in which case I notice and make a point about it. I'm like the Paula Abdul of poetry judging.

Like most people, I've written poetry, even love poetry; although I would never tell anyone that.

--

Today, as I was riding through intermittent rain on the way to work, I noticed a series of signs along the side of the road. They were yellow, and from a distance, I was keenly aware that they had words on them. As I got closer, I realized that each of the four signs contained one phrase from some sort of hate poem.

Before I dive further into the content, I should mention that I commute via the same country roads every single day; six days a week. I almost never see cars, I never see cyclists, I do see a few horses. So far as I can tell, I am the only human person who ever utilizes these roads. That's why, if a person writes hate poetry directed at a cyclist; and posts these poems publicly - on the side of this road! - they are probably directed at me.

I'm not quite sure what I've done to infuriate some fellow (or fellowette) to the point where he felt the need to pay actual money to have signs printed and displayed along the side of the road. I'm less certain about what I've done to inspire this kind of poetry:

A man who rides
A bike in the open
Isn't thinking
He's just hopin'

Goo. This is bad. Real bad. Like the kind of poetry Walt Whitman's guinea pig might compose, if only the guinea pig had thumbs and was also dumber than most guinea pigs. It seemed as rough as poetry could be, but then I noticed there was more of this metered verse.

Althouh insured,
Remember kiddo
They dont pay you
They pay you're wido

In case you were wondering, [sic], [sic], [sic], and [sic].* In four lines, this guy (or guyette) made four vicious, evil typos. And not just regular typos; but typos that he paid real, actual money to have printed for public consumption on roadside signs. These things tend to happen when anti-cycling activists consider themselves to be a poet and a copy editor. Euripedes is just one example of a guy who wrote cleaner English poetry than this, and Euripedes predates the English language.

*I always hate it when people throw a couple of [sic]'s in the middle of a paragraph. It really ruins the flow of whatever the writer was intending; although in this case there wasn't much in the way of flow. Or actual words.

--

Bad poetry aside, I'm wondering what this dude's (or dudette's) motive is. Is he advocating safety? Does he hate cyclists because he was raised by oppressive cyclists? Did Lance Armstrong steal his girlfriend?

I thought maybe I'd respond with a poem of my own:

When I ride my bike for a while
I decrease our demand for gas
I lower the price by two cents every mile
Please don't bother to check on my facts