Today’s prompt from the Ragtag Daily Prompt is “Crossword.” Let the trivia pedants have their neat little grid—this crossword puzzle is for the minds that prefer to burn the paper down instead.
Cover Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash.
The Black-and-White Cage
Give me a fire that can split a stone,
give me a premise of grit and bone,
give me a thought that will shake the room—
not a three-letter word for an ancient loom.
I don’t care what the silent film star ate,
or the name of a river in a Baltic state,
or a four-letter beast of the Andes trail,
or the cousin of a flounder, or a Caspian snail.
Who built these neat, claustrophobic pens,
to measure the intellect with parlor lens?
A petrified matrix of sterile recall,
where trivia postures and calls itself tall.
Ten little boxes for “Byzantine coin”—
the smug little trap where the pedants adjoin.
I want friction. I want sparks that bleed.
Not the boring facts that the archivists feed.
Give me a page that can take a strike,
not the sterile geometry the solvers like.
So, keep your neat margins. Keep 14-Across.
Your tidy symposium of cataloged dross.
I won’t shoehorn the fire into eight-letter slang:
I’d rather miss the answer,
and let the hammer bang.
Are you a dedicated grid-solver who lives for the trivia deep-dive, or do you share my burning urge to launch the puzzle out the window? Confess in the comments, or link your own take back to the Ragtag challenge.
Thank you for visiting with me. For more Reviews or Literature related content, visit my blog at The Ritual. Copyright Mind on Fire Books.
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