Woe is Me
“Alex Steelsmith has been a regular contributor to Light’s Poems of the Week… His attraction to a concluding pun in his double dactyls
is often both intriguing and irritating in equal measure, much like Shakespeare’s attraction to woeful puns.”
—Brief Poems
Happily, snappily,
Alex the dactylist
aims to intrigue with a
verse, but alas,
often a reader feels
irritability,
finding the ending a
pun in the ass.
The Flipped Script
“Existence precedes essence.”
—Sartre
Once upon a time, suspended
in their manifestly splendid
sempiternally extended
adolescence,
with impassionate persistence
and some Sartrean assistance
they devoutly chose existence
over essence.
Full of limitless potential,
deeming essence inessential,
they were boldly existential
and defiant;
never heeding whatsoever
nature’s guiding laws, the clever
puer aeternus is forever
incompliant.
Now, entrapped in bodies ailing,
feeling vital organs failing,
they retract their once-prevailing
paradigm;
though senescent and edental,
they achieve a stunning mental
leap into the transcendental,
just in time.
Never mind the contradictions
of their long-avowed convictions
as they flip, with no restrictions,
all their views;
they ignore the inconsistence,
choosing essence with insistence,
having little of existence
left to lose.