You don't like poetry. OK, that's fine. Whether or not you like Poetry, I'm fairly confident the Earth will keep spinning on its axis. You're a grownup now, and Mrs. Scott isn't making you do close readings of John Donne. That red pen has been out of ink for twenty years now, and you're a successful self-employed HVAC professional.

I'm using initial-cap "Poetry" because I'm imagining that, in your ears, Poetry takes on a single monolithic form, whether sonnet, haiku, or limerick. Am I hearing you correctly? And I wonder if you feel about poetry the way I feel about Spectator Sports. You see, I don't like sports, whether we're talking baseball, football, or pickleball. Truth.

Probably I feel even more animosity toward American football than you do toward poetry. Your dislikes are at least fashionable to Americans at large. I resent myself for not "getting" football, as it locks me out of so many socially-lubricating moments. Your taste is crowable from mountaintops and incurs no particular social penalties. Your pronouncement is followed by hoots of affirmation; my admission that I hate football, on the other hand, meets with soft grunts of confusion at best and evangelical outrage at worst.

Please, dear god, please don't try to explain football to me. I promise you it won't work. Better people have tried and it's always ended in tears. Afterward, I just ended up hating the game even more -- and with thirty fewer minutes left to live.

And don't worry: I won't explain poetry for you. It would just be rude, and you'd never get that half-hour back again. Nothing good would ever come from operating on someting which cannot (and, if I may, should not) survive the surgery, and poetry has never been something I enjoyed more for having picked it apart.

But I'm not dead yet, so it ain't over. I'm open to discovering new edges of my ignorance. Perhaps one day I'll venture back to the thrum of the bleachers. Perhaps from my seat in the stands, I'll hear the spiky loudspeaker, the garbled electronic of sound pecking like a pigeon at my eardrums, and I'll feel a not-unpleasant sizzle behind my eyes. Perhaps the smell of sweating hot dogs and the sight of pressed sunshine upon a slinting field of duotone color blocks will, through some sensory alchemy, combine with the scritch and shuffle of my seatmate's windbreaker to swoon me into a delicious moment of liminality, like a child at the apex of a swingset flight. And at that moment, though I could never tell you how, I might just say, Hey! I do like football!

And perhaps one day, from the time bubble of waiting-room boredom, you will spot a dogeared literary magazine and begin to flip its pages. Perhaps, to your shock, your eyes will alight on a phrase that evokes that early-morning scent of balsam fir, a scent that rips you through a wormhole and plants you in North Carolina, crunching gravel underfoot at your childhood summer camp. Disembodied happy shrieks dip like wrens, cut through by your best buddy's voice calling you from across the flag green.

If you are willing to let that moment be, if you will lift your nose and sniff and let the pine-oil memory rock you like a hammock, you will know something new. The moment will disperse like vapor, but you'll know. And you might even be willing, at that moment, to admit it.

No one saw you, and you don't even have to tell.

But you'll know then (if only then) that, in fact, you spoke too soon. For you'll see, though I'd never tell you so, that you really do like poetry.

When I read your challenge, the name "Swig Tuggerone" poked at my brain and refused to stop until I'd created a Prose account, logged out of one email account into another to confirm, and returned to the Prose site, whereupon I was furthermore marched through several additional steps and urged to beef up my own profile (like a bad boy?) before I was, at long last, permitted to return to your challenge, type the name out, and get this damn thing over with.

Oh! and since the challenge requires more than 15 words, my original attempt at a submission was initially bounced out, and I was ordered to return only if I had more to offer than the two-word name. So here I am, 189 words later, and it's all thanks to my man S-Tugg. (Don't ever call him S-Tug by mistake. He hates that, and you can imagine what happens then.)

If I were someone who loved "bad boys," I'd be in a hot bothered sweat by now. As it is, I'm glad to get rid of Swig Tuggerone, the bad-boy name that kicked my patience to the back of beyond. Now I can leave this character with my personal character witness as to his badassedness.

Buyer beware. That bad boy gets in your brain!