Caught in fewer words

Have you ever noticed that
shorter poems get to bat
on many more occasions than
their over-lengthy brethren?

Is that a fact in part explaining
Laws of Conservation claiming
spent creative energy
cannot be reclaimed for free?

Or is it just a fallacy
effected by urbanity to keep them short,
a myth that brevity enhances wit,
that lengthy poems are full of shit.

Where we writers let a poem grow
as poems will, the careful poet knows
the fragile life they breathe demands
you leave them unconstrained. And love
of words and slave to sounds
and rhythms that abound
in treasured, tangled lines will
not abbreviate in common kind.

Poets caught in fewer words and taut
expressions must rebel; curse you,
tell the truth you scurvy swine,
decline the shorter verse!

The truth, of course, is not a mystery
its driven by the beast of Reader Popularity,
not governed by a magic wand or intellect
or lack of time, but length of their attention span.
© I.D. Carswell