Do I Really Need a GED?

Do I Really Need a GED?

Some people need a GED
To go to college, don’t you see.
But I major in “Poetry.”

Social Studies, Science, too,
Everybody has their view.
But Poetry is what I do.

Writing and Arithmetic
I guess some people get a kick.
But Poetry now, that’s my Schtick!

Writing, maybe it’s okay,
And  I write poems every day.
But I write  Poetry “My Way.”

Reading is the final test.
I like to read a lot, I guess.
But Poetry’s what I do best.

So you can keep your GED.
And I will keep on living Free.
While working on my Poetry.

One of my ex-girlfriends told me that I needed to get a GED so I could get a better job. She brought me a booklet and I read through some of it and didn’t think I needed to go through all that trouble. That is one thing this poem is about. Another thing is what goes on inside the “poet’s mind,” which is my mind. It is not easy to write poems. Sometimes the words just don’t work out. I kept the booklet, and to do the poem, I looked at the five kinds of tests I would have to take, if I wanted a GED.

So, I thought I would just open up my mind to you, the reader, the way I open up my head and heart. One of the tests was in “math”, and there are not a whole lot of words that rhyme with “math.” “Path” and “bath” come to mind, and maybe I could use “path” in one of the lines, like to say  “And Poetry is my path.” But I could not think of a good way to get “bath” in there.  This is one of those things that keeps a Poet awake at night.

So I looked up rhyming words and found “wrath”, and also came up with “psychopath, sociopath, and homeopath.” I am not gay and I do not have any felonies on my record.  So that just leaves “wrath.” So I thought, maybe:

The test has got some Writing and Math.

But studying math can give you Wrath.

Beside’s that, Poetry’s my Path.

But something just doesn’t sound right.  Plus the other words all end in “path”, so if I was able to work them in somehow, then I would be rhyming “path” with another “path-ending” word. That is not how real poets would do it.

Now, things were getting really hard, because if I left “math” out of the poem, the other four parts of the GED test would be missing the really hard part of the test. So I got to thinking and finally, my “Muse” which is a Greek Poetry Goddess, talked to me and she said “Charles, just change “math” to “arithmetic. There are a whole lot of “ick” words that rhyme.” So I did, and I looked in the rhyming book and found “schtick”, which I thought was a mis-spelling. I looked it up, and come to find out it was just the word I needed. It is a Jewish word that means “your thing” or “talent.”

That is how this poem came to have a foreign word in it, which elevates the whole poem up a notch or two in poetic quality. But it took a whole chain of events for this to happen.  And, it took some really hard thinking and some inspiration. Poetry is not as easy as you think. Like I said in one of my famous poems, “Poetry is a Hard Profession.”