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My Way Or N A
Often, I enter a contest
I enter the ones I like best
But one sponsor said
Write stood on your head
I moved on to check out the rest
Another said stand in a bucket
Write Latin, or I’m gonna chuck it
Eight lines by the way
Or get an NA
I thought about that and said f… ..
[They say stick to your chosen form
You should never break with the norm
In two stanza’s time
I’m switching to rhyme
The purist would kick up a storm]
But what really scrambles my brain
Is what comes up time and again
It’s apps for surmounting
The problem of counting
And one’s a particular pain….
*
‘How many syllables’, that’s what gets me
The logic it uses ain’t easy to see
Take for example the simple word ‘Wouldn’t’
They say it’s one syllable…
See it?..
I couldn’t
It misreads quotation marks, single or double
A single’s a syllable….. doubles?…. no trouble
It claims that the open quote counts as a syllable
Yet the ensuing quote counts not at all
Now I’m not unique so I run with the crowd
And I’m sure that no-one reads quote marks aloud
With ‘How Many Syllables’, if demand lingers
I simply ignore it and count on my fingers
But Soup has a resource called ‘Syllable Counter’
Which disregards quote marks that it may encounter.
In ‘shouldn’t’ and ‘wouldn’t’ and ‘mustn’t’ and ‘couldn’t’
The syllables all number two
And all of that makes pretty good sense to me…
So does it make good sense to you?
*
I love writing poetry, dearly
And often I get it right… nearly
So please do feel free
To set rules for me
But ‘How Many Syllables’?…. Really?
Copyright ©
Terry Flood
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