If Rock and Roll stars can call the guitar
an axe
I can call poetry a katana
That is a samurai sword
the long one
not a Haiku-
that would be a dagger,
or Ninja Star
Maybe you think a poem is more like a machete
you'd be right
if you travel to remote places-often.
It will blaze your trail
ignite and light
to help you see where you are headed
not where you are going
Poems are not maps
of the real world
Life is a jungle, They say
not Poets
A poem is a katana
Its precision cuts through anything too
not just paper cuts-surface level
but deeply-through thick, dense fibers
before they know they've been severed
beheaded but indebted
bamboo is strong and fibrous but still
just blades of grass
that only a katana can mow
It will leave a mark
that smarts
stings while it sings
lyrical with steps
that cut
to the chase
but drop seedlings of new thoughts
leaving a trail
Some poems will leave you in stitches
those are for practice
to soften the blow
bokens of faith
like Samurai ‘Giggles Shel Silverstein’
a mean, clean, rhyming machine
amateurs should start with these
and wear pads
real poems are sharp, hand-forged
of tamahagane, not a wood,
but steel folded
holographic hamons prism,
cooled liquid in ripples, the poem effect
lining the traces, tracing the tails, watching feet,
hearing our heartbeat
in time with the light sabers swing
there for you to read,
if you can see it
before it fades so fast it was never there
when you try to speak of it
you had to be there
A poem is a katana
Making contact, shattering reality
with its crystallized matrix of pearls
lined in a common goal, on the steel cold page
double edged margins, sharp side up
pre-requisite knife skills essential
but you knew what you were getting into
it was for the show, on the cutting edge
one who wields with words like using
a poem as a katana.
Image By Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons,“Retained Weapins of vigilantes".
