Ech!

Majikthise points us into the direction of the magical verses of fake-nobel-laureate Dr. William Cheshire, that guy who says Tracy Schiavo is conscious despite her lack of cerebral cortex. I warn you. Should you go criminally insane and actual read that poem, you're in for a long sit full of strained rhymes and hackneyed imagery.

Okay, you twisted my arm. I'll analyze a segment of it and plum the Vogonesque depths of Dr. Cheshire's orthography:

If lost in County Rockingham,
A North Carolina mystery
Distorts one northbound exit ramp
Which enters highway two-twenty.

(The "two-twenty" in the final line throws the rhythm off and calls undue attention to itself, while adding virutally nothing aside from geographic trivia. Wouldn't "highway twenty" have served just as well? Of course the rhyme of "mystery" and "twenty" is desperately strained and ugly, and the "If lost in County Rockingham" is disgustinly faux-British, giving an olde tyme air that 'tis unsuited when tasks describing contemporary scenes there be.)

Don’t lessen your pressure on your brake
Or leave your car unoccupied,
For gravity reversed may make
Your unattended auto slide –

(Not if I set the parking brake it won't. Besides which, is there really substantial danger that I'm going to blithely decide to park on the exit ramp of a main road? You're not supposed to park on them at all, you know. Well, maybe I'm betraying my ignorance of North Carolina traffic laws. Anyway, the poet essentially breaks an ordinary sentence into two lines, then strains to find two fake poetic lines to complete the rhymes. "Gravity reversed may make"? It's one hell of a diction shift, as if some open-mic poetry slam twit had interrupted a driver's ed lecture.)

Uphill – defying Newton’s law!
Bewildered witnesses to this
Will ask, by what strange twist or flaw
Do opposite directions switch?

(The opening of the stanza is awkward. "Uphill" should have been in the last line of the last stanza. Evidently, Cheshire thinks that placing a hyphen at the end of the line indicates that the first line of the subsequent stanza is a continuation of his thought. Elipses or commas would be more correct if he wanted to place particular stress on "uphill" while signalling continuity of idea. And, again a traffic question. Wouldn't such people instead ask, who is this idiot and why did he leave his stupid car on the stupid exit ramp to roll around on its stupid fucking own? Is he out of his fucking mind?)

From slip to creep, from roll to rush,
The car let loose will plummet thus
On slopes too steep for eyes to trust.
Without true bearings, fall we must.

(First, as Mark Twain points out, there's an enormous difference between the right word and the almost-right word. "Plummet" is a verb meaning to drop straight down, in a like manner to the plummet, the metal bob of a plum line. Unless the car rolls off a cliff, the car is not going to plummet. The car can coast, slide, drift, ramble, rumble or race down a slope, but it can't plummet. Also, what is a slope too steep for eyes to trust. At what point does that take place. The vertical references surrounding the slope create the illusion, not the slope itself. Under ordinary conditions, we're pretty good at judging slopes, and well advised to trust our impressions. It's part of what's kept us alive for so many millions of years. Also, again a right word objection. Nothing in this situation is falling, things are sliding.)

Which way is up? Which way is best?
Confusion frames experience.
Whilst heavens rotate East to West,
Surrounding landscape orients.

(Which way is up is a silly question to ask? In places where such optical illusions happen, our sense of slope may be imperfect, but we still know, in a general way, which direction is up and which is down. Indeed, it's because we have a strong feeling of how gravity generally works that the slope illusion confuses us. We still know that the sky is up and the ground is down. And what does that have to do with which way is best? Sometimes up is best, sometimes down. Sometimes you're fucked whichever way you go. But why pound on that when we can hit "Surrounding landscape orients". What does the surrounding landscape orient? And why is it given agency? The surrounding landscape doesn't actually do anything. Observers examine the surrounding environment. In the biz we call it personification, and it has its uses. But because the line is unclear, it's hard to see what's gained in using the personification device.)

Our sense of vertical depends
On how the mountains shape this scene;
An optical illusion bends
Perspectives once erect to lean.

(True, but I was way ahead of you there. I learned that stuff when I was seven.)

When looming mountains lift our view
To north horizon upward nudged,
Inclining frames of reference skew;
A level path we cannot judge.

(Yuck. "To north horizon upward nudged"? "Nudged" is not a happy choice. The looming mountains and lifted views plummet back to earth in its syllables. It would be a better rhyme with "judge" (in that it would actually rhyme with judge) if it were in the present tense. But it's not, to its inclusion isn't even defensible on those grounds. Ugly. Ugly. "Inclining frames of reference" calls no real image to mind--quick, what does an inclining frame of reference look like?)

So how much more should we, therefore,
Rely on valid moral points
Of reference when we first explore
Requests oddly for death by choice?

(I'm confused. We've just been over how physical frames of reference can be skewed while appearing solid, yet now the rhetorical question wants me to rely more heavily on moral points over which people are much more likely to disagree? It is, presumably, a moral conflict that inspired this-uh-poem. If I were to stand next to Cheshire on this exit ramp, we would both experience the same optical illusion. Our senses would be fooled in the same direction. It's safe to say, however, that we experience moral questions in profoundly different ways, even though we're responding to the same event. How do I know his moral points are valid, or applicable, in the circumstances? Can't I have different, but equally valid, ideas about morality? How did morality acquire a clarity and solidity that physical experience lacks? How does he know his seemingly valid moral notions aren't, in fact, skewed by twisted frames of reference?)

The road that medicine could take
Toward doctor-assisted suicide
Would be a terrible mistake
Against which now we must decide.

(I could try to defend this stanza by saying that the use of "road" means to extend the exit-ramp-illusion metaphor, but that seems like a stretch to me. More likely he was simply using a cliche. The rest is more position paper than poetry.)

The Dutch have demonstrated well
The slippery slope along which we
Proceed once doctors cannot tell  
A lethal dose from therapy.

(If doctors can't tell a lethal dose from therapy, they're simply badly trained, not misguided. Because the Dutch generally have better health care than we do, I don't think that's the case. Slippery slope is another cliche. Maybe he could have gone British and said it was "the thin end of the wedge". Neither is especially poetic. "Proceed" is a poor word. Again, my I suggest "slide" or "tumble"? )

I think you get the idea here gang. This poem is bad. It is poorly written and thematically confused. The writer does not possess the sort of mind that would win a Nobel Prize, or even the sort of mind that should have graduated high school. My students do better than this, and for many of them English is their second or third language.