Ignoble Experiments

    We saw you try to abscond,
    Thinking there were no witnesses
    To your carnage.
    Well, fat chance
    We caught a glance
    And what we beheld was
    Unpulchritudinous!

    First you guzzle our energy,
    Stamp "Cancelled" on our time tickets,
    You capricious jerk,
    And then you go and make
    The last month hard to take,
    Dark and horrible,
    Cold and bleak.

    Right, that's it. The above piece qualifies as a complete failure. No more poems should be written (by me, anyway) with the intention of creating an allegory for the concluding year. There are two good lines, "unpulchritudinous" and the part about "cancelled" getting stamped on time tickets and that's it. This is what happens when you're in a creative slump and try to force things. Instead, let's see what can happen with no preparation or agonizing at all.

    Towns, towns
    Speckled across the state,
    Anonymous and quiet.
    One million never-to-be-told stories
    Languish in the grain.

    Now that could go somewhere, though not anywhere terribly distant or notable. Still, it's better than the first heap of junk. How about some doggerel for good measure? *

    Even saintly monks in noble robes
    Lose patience with arachnophobes
    When they flail and melodramatize
    Over a spider 1/1000th their size.

    Welcome, 2011! Let's see what you've got. 
   

*What does "for good measure" mean, anyway?