Fourteen lines of rhyming verse
No need for clever tricks.
Obey the rules or face a curse
No remedy can fix!
For those who can not do as told
There is no path to glory.
In sets of four the tale unfolds
And so becomes a story.
Be not tempted into broad display
Do not detail every instance.
Resist the line that leads astray
It’s the curse of least resistance.
.    Let the story tell itself, no metaphor need mix,
.    A story is a story, not like a pile of bricks.

© Tim Grace, 4 February 2010

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To the reader: As the traveller and poet learn, new ideas are built upon loose impressions that over time mature into tighter understandings. In the early stages of construction an idea is best left unconstrained and deserves the liberty to indulge in vagueness; to question and wonder without the confinement of certainty.

To the poet: The best comparisons happen naturally and need no forcing. Telling a reader that one thing is like another strips a poem of its own power to conjure a playful twist of thought. Vagueness in a literary sense can establish an intriguing ambiguity; it is suggestive and creatively loose – enticing.

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