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Reggie Marra has hosted the 3rd-Friday Open Mike at HVWC since 1997. He is an award-winning poet, a Master Teaching Artist with the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and the author of The Quality of Effort: Integrity in Sport and Life for Student-Athletes, Parents, and COACHES (From the Heart Press, 1991). His 27 years as an educator include 14 as a teacher, coach and administrator on the secondary level, 7 as an administrator and lecturer on the college level, and 6 as a migrant-educator-for-hire. Since 1996 he has brought his poetry-writing and Integral Studies workshops and retreats to schools in New York and Connecticut, as well as to the Hudson Valley Writers' Center, the Farmington Valley Arts Center, the Spirituality Institute at Iona College, and the NYS Women's Correctional Facility at Bedford Hills. He is a licensed teacher in New York State (English, 7-12). |
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Reggie Marra
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Poets Don't Drive Porsches
Reggie Marra
A regular, though not a
poet, at Eleanor's cafe,
asked if any of us owned the
Porsche with the lights on.
We laughed, then
darkened, harmonizing,
"Poets don't drive Porsches."
We threw a couplet to his chin and
raised our ironies into his tender groin.
We reduced him to a rough draft
loudly alliterated and lambasted him
kicked his assonance
rhyme and rhyme again.
Not knowing where to draw
the line, we broke it,
dumped a hyperbole of hot
soup in his lap, enjambed
his fingers, dropped
concrete nouns on his iambic feet,
piled image upon image upon
his fractured Muse.
We ripped off his shirt and
his pantoum, pushed him in front
of a runaway quatrain
that cracked his spine,
then rapped him 'til he sang the blues.
Our truculence left satire
marks across his body.
When he pleaded for a doctor,
we called two:
a paradox
who just confused him.
We pierced him with a spear
then shook it, and he gasped,
"Please don't shake speare -
this is no pun at all.
As you pound the life from me,
I feel great paine, and
though I may not be swift,
I fear that I am donne.
Too late have I learned what
a word's worth - poetic license
notwithstanding, poets
don't drive Porsches."
Almost gone, he turned toward
the proprietor as if to prove
some point, and whimpered with
his final breath, "I'm not
a villain, El."