Local Youths Practice Parkbench Poetry

While skipping home from my posh part-time job on yesterday's sunny evening, I noticed that someone had written a few poems on a park bench that I pass by regularly. These were definitely a new addition. My feet ached a bit from standing and walking all day in my sweet new Spalding sneakers that are still breaking me in, so I decided to park my can on the park bench and peruse the local literature. What follows is a recollection of pieces of two poems. I've taken artistic license and fused them together for your edification and amusement:

Speed weed birth control
Drink a forty smoke a bowl
Stoners live & stoners die
And in the end we all get high
If at first you don't succeed
[Expeletive] it all, smoke some weed!

Mind you, it's not exactly iambic pentameter, but this is a poem that could be sung, and I have to say I am impressed. I mean, I've been stoned before, and I've written poetry before, and I've written stoned poetry before, but my stoned poetry never had anywhere near the rhythm, rhyme, or clarity of message that these kids are producing. That's a quality poem, even if it is a bit simplistic and in a special interest genre.

Of course, just because they claim to be stoners doesn't mean that they are writing stoned poetry. Come to think about it, they had to be sober to write something as jingly as that. True stoned poetry is Jim Morrison, Allen Ginsburg, and perhaps John Ashbery (how else could he have come up with "White Roses" or become mtvU's poet laureate?)