Nothing can be allowed to stand between the poet's message and the audience's comprehension. Any device that complicates the graphic bluntness of the poem's narrative plot is judged as uselessly ornamental, and trashed in favor of the bluntest words, and dramatic synopsis as terse as a T.V.guide listing. Poems are shorthand for emotional truth. Whatever wounds is usable. There's no time when life is intensely felt to screw around with artificial rhyme schemes whose origins are in the oar-pulling rhythms of English long boats.
People drive cars today.
The air stinks withfumes. Today's rhythm is ninety miles an hour, over the speed limit, with one hand on the wheel and an impulse to cross the centerstripe into someone's headlights. That's the rhythm of Spoken Word poetry. Delivering his reportage straight from the guts, the Spoken Word poet signals that he or she is not only willing to put his or her ass on the line by living on the edge, but also keen to feed the audience's voyeuristic need to know the gory details. Philosophically-speaking, there's a lot of Rimbaud in this, but with a Henry Milleresque slant, an instinct not to burn out before the age of a hundred, to survive to laugh about it when all your detractors are R.I.P. on boot hill.