Cacophony of Conventional Wisdom

Conventional wisdom
 – my brashest, least-favorite oxymoron –
blares at unseemly decibels
saturating all possible outcomes
with the loudest of laziest hindsights

suggesting through simplistic screeches
that all rules are to be obeyed
and never scrutinized,
“don’t do the crime if
you can’t do the time”
and other nonsensical violations
against critical thought,

since whoever conjured such
banal ideas must have to
cram day and night
studying from rote books of
trite cliches and empty platitudes,
burning both ends of the candle,

giving one-hundred and ten percent
in an all-or-nothing
winner-take-all
nice-guys-finish-last campaign
just to be considered slightly above
average dimwits who think
about the box as an actual box
when thinking outside of said box,

completely oblivious to his
actual boxed-in nature, and no,

I’m not calling those types vapid,
obtuse, or hilariously freed from
reason and accountability – for
I do not enjoy stating that which
can be so easily observed
by anyone familiar with
the scientific method – I’m just

asking those braying hyenas
and jackasses to pipe-down a moment
so the rest of us can
hear ourselves think.

---

Written for NaPoWriMo Day 19 Prompt:

“Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a humorous rant. In this poem, you may excoriate to your heart’s content all the things that get on your nerves. Perhaps it’s people who tailgate when driving, or don’t put the caps back on pens after they use them. Or the raccoons who get into your garbage cans. For inspiration, perhaps you might look to this list of Shakespearean insults. Or, for all of you who grew up on cartoons from the 1980s, perhaps this compendium of Skeletor’s Best Insults might provide some insight.”

NaPoWriMo Day 19 Prompt

I struggled a bit with this one. I had to keep my thoughts abstract because whenever I leaned into concrete and specific ideas, I found myself writing recklessly about things that could cause me problems if the wrong person read them, and conventional wisdom told me to play it safe, which made me really pissed at conventional wisdom for a few minutes, and I hate it when a poet or artist overexplains their art, especially via long, run-on sentences, don’t you?

Anyway, that’s how this particular sausage was made.