Poem 28: Skeltonic verse

The prompts are becoming more ... prompty.

Harrumph, she says, thinking she might boot the prompt to the curb this time.

But she doesn't, because she's just the Type A person who follows all rules, no matter how dodgy.

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Here's the prompt, in all of its unglory:

... write a poem using Skeltonic verse. Don’t worry, there are no skeletons involved. Rather, Skeltonic verse gets its name from John Skelton, a fifteenth-century English poet who pioneered the use of short stanzas with irregular meter, but two strong stresses per line (otherwise know as “dipodic” or “two-footed” verse). The lines rhyme, but there’s not a rhyme scheme per se. The poet simply rhymes against one word until he or she gets bored and moves on to another. 

Here is a good explainer of the form, from which I have borrowed this excellent example:

Dipodic What? 

Dipodic Verse
will be Terse.
Stress used just twice
to keep it nice,
short or long
a lilting song
or sounding gong
that won’t go wrong
if you adhere
to the rule here,
Now is that clear
My dear?

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What's clear to me is that the form results in the kind of poetry that makes me a bit gaggy.

*

Dipodic Lament

Like bad weather
interrupting pleasure

or bloody feathers
on the window ledge,

a cat below the hedge,
these two beats

are not the sweet
flow of fleet

sounds, the neat
poetic meat

of an eloquent poet's
melodic show. It's

a crash bang
stomp twang

crunchy baggage,
trashy language

like a wind-blown
yolk-yellow comb

speaking flat words,
or desiccated turds

up in Spring herds,
stinking shards

exposed now in the yard
after a long, hard

melting of old
contaminated snow.