Rhyme is a terrible, tyrannous thing,
Making your verse like a squat till ring:

Press any lever and hear it sing
Its silly, repetitive ding! ding! ding!

Poets of old got fat through its clatter;
Quite what they wrote about; that didn’t matter:
So long as you owned the till, you waxed fatter –
It was the system, you see: but now it’s through, in the gutter;

and modern verse sets us free at last
to fly where we so desire;
wer’re more grown up,
see?
we can craft whatever shapes suit ourselves,
like sculptors, say, or
genetic modifiers, or
dot.com tycoons
know what I mean?
waltzing
to the tunes
of our mobile phones
roaring past doddering pedestrians
in our mean machines
with number plates like
SCREW RHYME!
and then
having had our fling
like kids we occasionally like to
hit that old lever –
DING!
DING! DING!
just to hear it sing