I was on the phone w/ someone who lacks any real or imagined appreciation for Billy Collins. The discriminate-minded someone always stands up for making sense; it is the someone's opinion that free verse doesn't count as a true poetic endeavor. The someone's analytical rap is that free verse is unrefined and unrhymed. Until I expounded on the intricacies of free verse, the someone probably thought Billy Collins was just some greasy bloke at Express Oil. So I was about to recite something resembling free verse to the someone via a 12-mile landline, and I began w/ this excursive preface:i wrote a poem, or sort of a poem
i wouldn't call it a poem
unless you're billy collins, the poet laureate
in which instance it is a poem
of which i don't understand
the qualifications of a poem
Anyway, the someone mistook my preparatory remarks for the intended poem and put forth, lo and behold, the someone's general approbation. And so began, for the someone, a newly found respect for free verse. I tried frenziedly to remember what just sprang from my scurrilous tongue, and even asked rhetorically, "what was it I just said?" But I couldn't rely on the someone remembering because the someone only dedicates half an ear to these things. Luckily for me I took my daily allotment of ginkgo biloba. So after I reconstructed it out on fifteen multicolored miniaturized sticky notes, I began to feel that it was actually a far superior extracurricular doodle to the matte-surfaced rubbish-filled scrap of paper I was initially holding. I love you Billy.
