All Their Stanzas Look Alike

By Thomas Sayers Ellis

All their fences

All their prisons

All their exercises

All their agendas

All their stanzas look alike

All their metaphors

All their bookstores

All their plantations

All their assassinations

All their stanzas look alike

All their rejection letters

All their letters to the editor

All their arts and letters

All their letters of recommendation

All their stanzas look alike

All their sexy coverage

All their literary journals

All their car commercials

All their bribe-spiked blurbs

All their stanzas look alike

All their favorite writers

All their writing programs

All their visiting writers

All their writers-in-residence

All their stanzas look alike

All their third worlds

All their world series

All their serial killers

All their killing fields

All their stanzas look alike

All their state grants

All their tenure tracks

All their artist colonies

All their core faculties

All their stanzas look alike

All their Selected Collecteds

All their Oxford Nortons

All their Academy Societies

All their Oprah Vendlers

All their stanzas look alike

All their haloed holocausts

All their coy hetero couplets

All their hollow haloed causes

All their tone-deaf tercets

All their stanzas look alike

All their tables of contents

All their Poet Laureates

All their Ku Klux classics

All their Supreme Court justices

Except one, except one

Exceptional one. Exceptional or not,

One is not enough.

All their stanzas look alike.

Even this, after publication,

Might look alike. Disproves

My stereo types.

Copyright Credit: Thomas Sayers Ellis, “All Their Stanzas Look Alike” from The Maverick Room. Copyright © 2005 by Thomas Sayers Ellis. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press.

Source: The Maverick Room (Graywolf Press, 2005)