The Sunday Poem: When Is a Rhyme a Rhyme?

I am here in Austin for AGDC, after a difficult day of travel. My last-ditch attempt to make it to Rudy’s for some BBQ before they closed missed by 20 minutes thanks to various flight delays. So here I sit with Sonic cherry limeade, melancholy, a Marriott substituting for a garret, to write a Sunday poem for you… 😉

When is a rhyme a rhyme? A pair of words
Vibrating twain and twin, a homonym
A scanty, scarcely fraction time, a blur
Of vowels assonancing on a whim…
Half verb, the penult, higher ante, quill
That sometimes speaks in halves and sometimes sprung,
And in the clumsy piling on of syll,
The ables and alliterate undone.
Is all it is the music? Nothing else
applies? The quatrain’s break, the plosive sound,
The prayer on the couplet’s open verse?
The sense of it, the consonance profound?
The algorithm elegant, the twinning still sublime,
Is it still a poem, if we forget to rhyme?