No Pegasus

It looked a lot like a poem; it had lines

that preached enjambment; it had rhymes, of sorts,

both approximate and exact. It stopped on dimes.

Then started up again. It had cohorts—

metaphor and imagery and such—

and liked to keep time by beating on its

chest, though some might have said it walked with a crutch

and took more liberties than most of its fellow sonnets.

But it wasn’t a poem, or at least it said it wasn’t.

For who would want to be so small a thing?

It wanted to be a novel, and who doesn’t?

It hid its horsy face, its tail, its wing,

under a cloak of prose. It stopped prancing.

But try as it might, it could not sing.

—Ronald Wallace