Ode to Attention Deficit Disorder

[DaveAshley]

Sweet ADD, you groovy sod,
My jumbled thoughts often plod,
Turning them from mush to rotting cod.
And back once more again.

You are the daily affliction,
Making reality into rites of fiction
Of garbled commands on a mission,
Firing through my brain.

Random and fidgeting on the chair,
Like a person without any other cares,
Though really, I’m just full of empty stares,
With my wandering mind.

And in conversations I must butt in,
Otherwise, those fleeting thoughts grow thin,
They must accompany the chatting din,
Which is why I often opine.

Random is, what random does!
A sentence I used to smile and love,
It pushes the point and then it shoves,
Blackening the shine

Of what I think is truly fun
Though others say what should be done
Is deprive me of vital oxygen.
As I’m excitedly getting louder.

[RiverNotch]

generally speaking, while i agree that spoken english doesn't necessarily "flow" like strict iambics or trochaics, as you've noted in another thread, poetry is meant to be different from spoken english. after all, most english speakers don't regularly rhyme, either, as you attempt to do so here.

hence my critique, which for now is largely technical, is that this piece would be much better served regularizing the meter. iambic tetrameter here, i think, except in the last trimetric line:

Sweet ADD, you groovy sod,
My jumbled thoughts often plod, -- my jumbled thoughts you often plod
Turning them from mush to rotting cod. -- transforming them to rotting cod
And back once more again.

You are the daily affliction, -- you are my day-to-day affliction

a note here, but recently i've been getting back to writing in strict prosody, and a really handy tool i've found doing so is basically any thesaurus. one hears "day-to-day" enough in daily speech, but i still needed to look up first any synonyms for daily in order for this to work.

Making reality into rites of fiction -- you turn my truth to rites of fiction,
Of garbled commands on a mission, -- of garbled orders in a mission
Firing through my brain. -- firing across my brain

and so on. all these corrections notwithstanding, if this didn't rhyme, i don't think not having a proper meter would be as much of a problem. generally speaking, a poem with impeccable meter doesn't need rhyme -- see milton or shakespeare or leopardi -- but anything that rhymes *does* need meter, with such meter having to be less wonky the more detached a piece is from, say, a musical melody. bad prosody is far more excusable in song lyrics, or the mode by which most folks are exposed to poetry nowadays, than in a read poem, and this one just doesn't have any such extraverbal production to coast on, at least for now.

as for what the poem is supposed to say, while i can probably critique some of the images here -- isn't fresh cod less mushy than its rotten counterpart? -- i think the process of reworking this piece according to its meter will help on that department, too, because meter often forces someone to add or subtract a detail they otherwise wouldn't have thought of, just like how some rhymes can read forced or others can astonish. either that, or my equally addled mind is just so distracted by prosody so close to not being wonky....

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....and i just realized this is in poetry for fun. eh xD