Infernal Poetry Practice

My poem will go down in flames,

Its metaphors burning embers

Its anaphora, its anaphora annihilated, its anaphora annihilated carbon

My caesura – well – charred

Charred like a simile in Nero’s Rome

Or jammed like an enjambment

A Chicago allusion of cow hooves and

A lamp in a phlogiston of history.

My poem will extend its flaming comparison

And crackle and pop, crackle and pop;

Its onomatopoeia will blaze with alliteration

Sparks sputtering, scarring and scorching,

The assonance, oh only oxidized assonance,

An inferno of incandescence.

And it will smolder, a remnant

Like the devouring conflagration

Of London’s glorious Globe.

It will die in a couplet, a rhyming demise

Its words only ash, no hope for reprise.