Ode to GRE
by Lacey Smith


Impetuous words that force their way from my mouth,
cavernous carniverous syllables mounting
the implicit hills of my tongue, teasing temptresses
in austere temples, building roads that tangle
through the webs of my capillaries.

I propitiate the whirling whistles of dirges with a
petipatetic stroll, my feet attenuating the cries
of my restless legs. My thoughts are desultory--
I disabuse the notions of my ingenuous impulses,
an onerous task for an erudite mind,
obsequious to the words as they fill my head.

I want to create a conflagration, a volatile mass
of heat and sound to enervate the bombastic tendencies
of such a mind when at ease, the obdurate notions
of my consciousness. My heart foments rebellions,
joining my organs with a fervid cry to the quiescent masses
of my tissues, inimical sinews, the antipathy of my skin.

I prevaricate my reasons for not sleeping,
though torpor injects itself free-form into my every limb,
it cannot occlude my caustic verse. Though dilatory at birth,
the pragmatic production of lines on page proves exigent to the process,
an estimable effort of efficacy.

Though I try to find a tacit solution, I find myself lacking
in every quantifiable manner, becoming a misanthrope,
wanting to be alone with my words, a paragon of pedantic veracity.
Approaching the dictionary with veneration, my study becomes perfunctory,
I sit taciturn as the words mollify my senses,
my body plastic but my attentions stone.

I can be exculpated from my stolid reputation with words that corroborate,
and I am impervious to the perfidious friends I find in cliches,
credulous to their equivocating flirtation, their blatant chicanery.
My sentences are anachronistic, ephemeral, the work of cogent rhetoric
gone hopelessly inchoate, my awareness desiccated.

I am a dilettante, flitting from meaning to meaning, diffident in manner
when questioned on my abilities. I feel the need to malinger,
to dissemble, to play the iconoclast regarding this world of standardization.
I tend to aggrandize my ardor for such a gargantuan lexicon,
becoming garrulous as words profilerate in my consciousness,
and meanings amalgamate, much to my chagrin.

I am irascible, and I castigate the laconic and reticent, a chauvinist of sorts,
amused only by my own kind, those of the florid palaver.
I abscond from the specious pretention of such folk, repudiate the prodigal use of breath:
an opprobrium to mankind! I am implacable, nothing can ameliorate or assuage
these intransigent insistencies of my ever-growing obsession.

But these words are soporific, and I become capricious on matters of my mental health,
and I rarefy sleep. I defer to those far stronger than I, who obviate the need to study
with their natural talents. The sting of sleep is pungent, such precipitate zeal
does not go unpunished, and the whirling dervish that is these words suddenly appears
entirely insipid.

12/11/2008

Author's Note: So...this poem is so ridiculous and not meant to be taken seriously. Before I took the GRE, I decided the best way to memorize GRE vocabulary would be to use as many GRE words as possible in a single poem that actually made sense because I was using the words contextually. It actually worked pretty well, but this poem is just absurdity.

Posted on 10/17/2011
Copyright © 2024 Lacey Smith