Strike! Poem by Donal Mahoney

It’s a big book, a thousand pages,
a million words, a bestseller,
and the verbs are mad as hell
because the nouns get all the credit
even though the nouns go nowhere
if the verbs don’t take them,
never mind the adjectives,
those leeches on the nouns,
getting the same free ride.

It’s reached the point where the verbs
have had enough and plan to quit
the book and leave the pages blank
unless they get $15.00 an hour
to keep on dragging nouns
and adjectives from cover to cover
plus overtime tossed in
for adverbs and prepositions
and a nice bonus for conjunctions.