Teaching Slant Rhyme

I have always wanted to write a poem in which lavender
rhymes with vendor or scavenger but mostly cadaver,


but the image--imagine a literary journal's response--
seems inadvertently humorous--and there seems no nonchalant


way to pair them, to rhim them, as my students
say, which is a marked improvement


over their DO NOT RHYME policy
and their almost comic cacophonies


composed confidently through alliteration,
and when they get it, it becomes an addiction--


one kid rhims porridge with dirigible,
another, having fallen in love with Prufrock's dreariness


and his own cleavernss suggests fellatio and go,
and another student, in eatnest, asks what's fellatio,


and I try not to laugh, to let
another student


say it, but no one does--a blow job,
I blurt, having reached an all-time teaching low,


and another, seeing I am losing control
suggests go and polka dot


and they go down the cananendwordbetwowords path
and come back to craft,


which kind of goes with Pabsts, which one argues
is not that bad a beer, and so the impromptu


debates on the vurtues of PBR,
which one declares sells well in this recession--or so he heard


on CNN--a connoisseur, he also notes the virtues
of Natty Light and when asked for a 50% rhyme for virtue


he says river, rivet, turtle, true--here I should note that I stole
the percentage concept from an old


mentor who does not like to be called old. But never mind.
What do you say to a twenty-year-old who hears Kevlar


and thinks larva, lava, valley, ale, and just because
he can adds vulva and uvula and pauses dramatically for guffaws?


I'm sorry, kid, but you're going to be a poet.
and poet


is an orphan,
a word for which there are no pure rhymes, like orange.


I'm sorry you have a gift for words.
I'm sure your parents would have preferred


even geology over writing,
but here you are spiraling


spite, rips, lipid, dalliance, nascent, land
          and pyrrhic, hiccup, puce and pedal.
-Leah Nielsen