Poetic License

I respond to your dour

critique with poetic license. 

It lets me get away

with much.

I weave my revving coupe

to the Froot Loop aisle.

Upturned avocados, the smash of

window slab,

aren’t an issue with

my privilege.

Everything’s a shard

in modern verse. See how

well I’ve ducked it? Like lapis

effing lazuli. What else

can a poet spout? I taped

my only Webster’s

with Bazookas.

The gum, not the gun.

That still counts as rime.

My permit makes

me cleverer

by the 2^nd.

I dabble in obfuscation.

Claiming night is a drunken

cabbage full of mites. 

Though I’m supposed to speak

in threes, I’ve got nothing to

follow that up with. I’ll riff

a line in Latin

about some cheese.

I rub my sanction in the visage

of the swine. The lot

around the cop shop

is Daytona’s final lap.

My brakes screech like a

boar before the blade—

castration, circumcision,

what’s the diff? It’s my poem,

dammit. Laws of physics

need never apply.

Your eyes will melt in ice—

such is the frigidity of

your essence.

It doesn’t have to make

any cents. The teller

told you nothing.

To hell with capitalism!

Whenever you spot a

typo, I’ll BS like

Morissette. Bawl it’s irony.

As for paradox

& chickens, which the other bards

flog to death,

I can do that too.

Standing on my skull

in the Aegean,

reciting Russell Edson—

who’d somehow earned the right

to say whatever the

fuck he wished—face alight like

Heston aping Moses,

all that he had blubbered

cut in clay, moulting flake by flake.

Everything is breakfast at the finish.

Andreas Gripp

July 24, 2026

photo: Underwood Archives / Getty Images