I am in agreement with Tamarind, too. Please see my recent response to her. I think we are all on the same page, but getting polarized by some misconceptions. Good poetry is good poetry period, regardless of whether it is rhyming or non rhyming.

Indeed, there is a lot of “senseless verse” out there (both rhyming and free verse forms). I will read neither. Now, a poem might not be accessible, and it is this you might be talking about. I think poetry should be accessible. Deeper meanings can be layered in the poem and “everyone” should get something out of it if the poet has done his/her job. That’s part of the crafting process — clarity. Unfortunately, some poems leave me scratching my head wondering what was going on. I understand that part of the responsibility of “getting it” is up to me, but the burden is up to the author.

There is some confusion in the Internet about what is “forced rhyme.” Disregard those that say forced rhyme is when a word doesn’t perfectly fit aurally. Actually, that’s a half-rhyme or slant rhyme, and it is a good thing. Forced rhyme refers to the insistence of a hard rhyming word for the sake of making the rhyme with a complete disregard for the poem. It may even compromise rhythm and flow, the metrical discipline to get that rhyme (which includes line length and meter), let alone the meaning. When the word is forced into the poem for the sake of rhyme, it is called forced rhyme.. Sometimes the poem will use an archaic technique called introversion (reversing the natural order of words) to accommodate rhyme, or make up silly make-up words (which might still be fun for a preschoolers and jabberwockies). So are all hard rhymes forced? Of course not! Only when it sounds unnatural.

AllPoetry has some examples: http://allpoetry.com/column/7523857-What_is_Forced_Rhyming__-by-Mephitic_ID_Synergy

Hope this helps.

It is my belief that the “general public” prefers rhyming poetry and are in disagreement with the literati about what is good.

some memories continue to cut
like a thigh chain.
hoping to become a bright angelic intellect
something straight out of aquinas
or the book of tobit,
I feel the uplink chip on the back of my neck
and leap clear of the edge
of the tarnished cathedral
where dark age gargoyles cling,
drooling rain onto dirty meatspace streets below.
what remains—the equivalent of thoughts
on a flash drive—rises, shimmering,
into 13 dimensions of crystalline cyberspace
as a will more free; no longer anchored
by a body to one life, one past,
where the first girl I fell in love with didn’t know
how to love me back, where the scar closed
that semiconducting gate, leaving a zero
instead of a one in my circuitry,
coded among the myriad zeros and ones.
now I become a quantum,
flapping modal-logic wings tracing a path
through possible worlds,
with all and other uploaded selves,
freed, too, of flesh and bones,
crowding to dance
on the head of a single holographic,
superframe pin. I wonder: if I will find her
there, someday — the freshman;
if she will have made the high sacrifices
for an uplink, if I will recognize her
without those cobalt blue eyes
or the sound of her laugh?

Callisto to Ganymede

I have no words
of comfort for the likes of you,
my sad, charmed boy.

Jove’s bloated court echoes with snores,
yours loudest, when I wander through.
I have no words

to make my cratered form cohere:
banished hunter, raped virgin, beast.
You sad, charmed boys

think toting Chardonnay’s a dream,
but Jove still fucks you in your sleep.
I have—no, words

can’t compare with mouthfuls of hair
and bile. Our void has no echo,
my sad, charmed boy,

so don’t ask me to conjure up
your soft grass bed. I’m all darkness,
I have no words,
O sad, charmed boy.

(First published in Strange Horizons, 18 June 2012)
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2012/20120618/frederick-p.shtml

Hurricane Ophelia

She soaks up sadness with the falling rain
then hurls her sodden figure at the sky:
Ophelia has become a hurricane.

The dead men’s fingers offered her free reign
to let her father squeeze her mind bone dry.
She soaks up madness with the heavy rain.

Now empty, she takes pleasure in refrains
both harsh and fiercely sung, notes held on high.
Ophelia has become a hurricane,

a storm of breadth and power. Wild domains
await her as she whirls around her eye.
She soaks up terror. With the stinging rain,

she means to plunge the vile and vicious Danes
into the darkness where her sweet soul lies.
Ophelia has become a hurricane,

and hurricanes are roars, fists, pulsing veins,
and nevermore will she, in tears, comply.
She soaks up anger with the pounding rain—
Ophelia has become a hurricane.

(First published in Goblin Fruit, Summer 2012)
http://www.goblinfruit.net/2012/summer/poems/?poem=hurricaneophelia

A Reply from His Changeling Mistress

They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.…
—Sir Thomas Wyatt

I flee from thee that now seeks to commit
My fluent body to a parchment tomb.
You lured me once with song and gentle wit,
A draught of Lethe’s water to consume;
Thus for your ready pleasure I assumed
The shapes of creatures rare, sleek, small and strange.
Yet now you wonder at my need to range.

Dear heart, how little you yourself remember
When my gaunt figure crept along the floor,
Collecting crusts half-eaten while you slumbered,
Your taste for me full sated long before,
My conquered self too soft, boiled bland, a bore.
Those lips, that only foreign fruit placates,
The humble cherry rarely fascinates.

 
So I depart to chase newfangleness
While you, the proud forsaken, me upbraid,
With caustic lines decry my faithlessness,
And for your suff’ring ask how I am paid.
Poor man, what use is mercy to a maid?
Like sea-born gyres, we spin far from your reach,
No ink to stain your poem’s bankrupt speech.

(First published in Eye to the Telescope, Issue 4, April 2012)
http://eyetothetelescope.com/archives/004issue.html

MOON SONG

Sometimes, when I am driving
and the moon hangs fat in the sky
like it did last night
I can sing a song to wake the dead.

I don’t know if it’s me casting the spell
or the spell casting me
I just know that the song rises
like the ocean reaching for the sky

and I sing until my voice cracks
as I pull into the driveway
and when my voice fades
there is an echo.

I don’t know if it’s something that I did
or something that happens to me
but I sang the dead awake last night, and I think
they followed me home

because now I have ghosts dancing inside me.
Their steps are loud enough
to wake the living
and I am shaken

but I don’t know what song to sing
to send them back to sleep again.

WARREN
(The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, August 2012)

In the warren of my heart
many pious knights are soothed
and snared,

their tears painstakingly collected.
In the bedroom moments, I opened my breast
and let them tap the light there.

Every man is a boy with a broken heart,
every woman mother’s softer shadow.
The love I feel is real, but

there comes a time
a cross-road,
the dark of a well…

Be careful, son.
All the pain in the world
bleeds somewhere.

ITINERANT
(Illumen, Autumn 2012)

I keep dreaming that we are playing a fatal game.
If I overtake you, I will ingest you and glow brighter.
Every evening, we go cascading through a landscape infused with light
past the heavy, sleepy after-images of
what walks down there, what dies.

I know that they are only shades of my nocturnal wanderings
so it is okay to rape and bind them and snuff out the lights
but why I do these things when I am with you
leaves me uncomfortable at dawn.

She sleeps in golden sheets, spooned around a prince.
I hover, envying her silk, bright bed, her pleasant things.
I shoot him once in the back of the head.
It’s all right. Remember, this is only a dream.

I drag her body across the carpet and down the stairs.
I wrap her up in astral knots, stuff her mouth with prayers.
I pose inside her
full-length mirrors, I dance in candle-light.

I pull down the sheets as the sirens scream
and I invite you in. You tell me again, “They’ll never find you.
Just lie with me here, tonight.”
But I can’t shut my eyes.

As in life, I can only touch you between the capture
and the flight. Silent check, check-mate
it’s time to play again
and I awake unsatisfied.

I come to fear that the only thing real about you
is the itinerant ghost
moving in between the worlds that I create
and those that created you and me.

And I think, what a monster I would be if I did not dream.
If I could not open this portal between us, nightly
what might seek other avenues of escape?

This is the only place my spirit awakens
to the shadow that sleepwalks through my days
so when night falls, I signal to begin.
You think it is another race to the death
but, really I am just calling you home.

See also:
“Undoing Winter” – Jabberwocky, August 2012
http://www.jabberwocky-magazine.com/2012/08/undoing-winter/

“When Brothers Go Wandering Off” – Scape Zine, September 2012

“Come Kali” – Eternal Haunted Summer, Summer 2012
http://eternalhauntedsummer.com/issues/winter-solstice-2012/come-kali/

When the children ask
What became of Father’s eyes?
we tell them it was the brambles.

It gets easier with the telling.
At night, by the hearth, he knits
caps, blankets, stockings for their little feet

he weaves tales
each more elaborate than the last, each
further from the truth

his hands are nimble as his tongue
he used to kiss me, once
he used to tell me stories, too

our love, undying
my beauty, peerless
his kingdom, gold and sapphires

What did I know of men, then
of love, of beauty, of wealth?
I knew only you, sister

mother, lover, soft and simple
poor within our tower walls
How could I have known?

I was a child in your arms
and childhood is blind
but memory is sharp as thorns.

I see, at night, while the children sleep
when I lie with him, backs touching
only for the warmth

— he would have left me to die.
But I sold my hair, that cold, cold spring;
belly full of bastards, I stole

unformed radishes to survive
I slept on the hard earth
in the shadow of the spire

I cried my voice raw
Gothel! I was a fool! I was wrong!
Damn you and your virgin’s pride.

Like a fledgling fallen from the nest
my scent erased by human hands
I cannot go home again.

Do you know, he gnashes his teeth?
On nights of the full moon, he weeps
and he calls your name.

How confident he was that night
in his borrowed finery,
a fistful of bellflowers

a mouthful of lies
how lean and perfect
striding, climbing, thinking me gone

thinking I’d leapt from the bluffs, perhaps
broken from shame
so arrogant and brutal

hunting at your window
thinking you just another woman
to seduce, to own.

I can still see
his face, under the moon
the stark white of awe

of rapture, suspended
at the sight of you
oh, Gothel

what I would give
to behold you again
to have seen, even

the horrible glory
of you, enraged
a loveliness to outshine

even the brightest of stars
my love, my dearest,
I would rather be blind

then stumble in this dark night.
But I watched, still as stone
as he screamed, as he rent

in madness, in humility
his eyes
as he tumbled from heaven

back to earth, to my feet
the shell of a man
mine to mend.

Your parting gift to me
I know this now: you let him live
two mortals bereft of Eden

what had we to do but begin again?
But do you know, Gothel
he weeps for that last vision

and I envy him.

When they ask now, he says
it was a witch, a monster
that thrust him from the tower

and thorns that took his sight.
He tells us it was
me he sought for

that his intentions were pure
and his injuries the reason
today we want for bread.

I do not contradict him.
Stories are food for the soul
but this is only dangerous

if the listener is well fed.
What did I know of hunger, then
Sister, Friend, my

love, my beauty, my wealth?
It is time that shows us
we do not see what we possess

until it is gone.

Selected Regions of the Moon

Mare Ingenii
_The Sea of Ingenuity_
Hidden from Earth,
landing site of our exploratory probe.

Mare Smythii
_Smyth’s Sea_
The first observation and surveillance station.

Mare Australe
_The Southern Sea_
On the edge of visibility,
launch site for the initial wave of attacks.

Palus Epidemiarum
_The Marsh of Disease_
Where the last human was brought
for the Ceremony of Extermination.

Mare Frigorus
_The Sea of Cold_
Where its frozen remains are displayed.

Sinus Iridum
_The Bay of Rainbows_
Where we held the Rites of Victory
and planted the sacred flags:
The Flag of The Maker’s Promise,
The Flag of Inherent Destiny,
The Flag of Eternal Conquest.

Oceanus Procellarum
_The Ocean of Storms_
Staging area of the 7th Engineering Division,
beneath our newest planet, gleaming
blue and white in the dark sky,

now sterilized
and ready for Insemination.

“Selected Regions of the Moon,” Buzzkill: Apocalypse – An End of the World Anthology, NightBallet Press 2012, Editor/Publisher: Dianne Borsenik, nightballetpress@gmail.com

*

Liquid Imagination. Issue #15. November, 2012. 1 poem – Stop praying, girls.
http://licontent.liquid-imagination.com/article/stop-praying-girls-by-j-a-grier/

Stop praying, girls

Best you can ask for
is to get turned into a tree.
So be grateful for the sudden
mouthful of dirt,
the birds in your leafy hair
And you can thank your gods
he can only frot your
unresponsive bark, pushing
wood against wood,
coming in an indifferent knothole.
You surrendered the nails you
could have used inside his eyes,
gave up the screams and kicking
and the flesh that sometimes heals.
Instead you are rooted skywards
in humility of the virgin gift
as he finishes, panting, free to
walk away, his mind already on
another nymph-cum-laurel
who’s only crime is looking like
the way love should feel.

****

SNM Horror Magazine, Fall 2012 Dark Poetry, 1 Poem – Gray Balloons
http://www.snmhorrormag.com/snmdarkpoetryas.htm

Gray Balloons

Come fly with us
the other children say.
The boy is suspicious
and looks at the gray
balloons each has
clutched in a hand.
Watch, come fly,
we do it every day!
One of them ties
the cord around his
neck, and is pulled
off the ground. The
children are in the air
flying, bodies limp,
eyes staring, tongues
hanging out – all but
one, the last. We will
bring you a balloon
of your own tomorrow!
She ties the cord tight,
turns purple and chokes
as her body sails away.

****

Eye to the Telescope, Issue 5, LGBTQ Special Issue, July 15, 2012. 1 Poem – A Zombie Anthem.
http://eyetothetelescope.com/archives/005issue.html

A Zombie Anthem

Time to give it up, now, the need for skin and hair.
We’re all shambling zombies who don’t care what they wear.
An apocalypse of corpses destructing as we go,
losing ears and toes and fingers—the process isn’t slow.
Since human life is over we are a brand new race
where no one needs a face lift ‘cause no one has a face.
That one’s got no balls, there, and that one’s got no breasts
and what we were before this is anybody’s guess.
So rejoice in our new freedom from biases and pain
it’s only gonna last ‘til we run out of brains.

La Mort et son puceau

They say that once, when Death took her mate,
the pomegranate seeds stained his mouth like blood
from a heart still warm.
No one came to threaten
or to plead. He grew accustomed to the darkness
and the whispering souls, at last forgot to shudder
in his lover’s cold caresses. Stay, she murmured.
He drew her into his first embrace.

inkscrawl, April 2012
http://inkscrawl.net/issue3-april2012/curry-la-mort.html

La Dame à la licorne

Somehow, she always knew that the unicorn
was what she’d been waiting for. Why have a man
when you could have the shimmering horn,
the cloud-white mane, the eyes that shone like
polished stones? She sat in the dry leaves,
a maiden in a pleasaunce, its head on her knees.
It slept while she dreamed of a millefleur forest
and the end of the story by a pomegranate tree.

There was a long afterward. When they emerged
from a tangle of boughs, it all seemed different,
like looking through the other side of a mirror.
She stroked the unicorn’s shivering flank,
remembering the crimson warmth of the tapestry.

Strange Horizons, September 2012
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2012/20120903/curry-p.shtml