I want a pony!

When I was a kid, my brother and I played innumerable rounds of Horse. Or Pig. Or even Superman which was a reversal of Horse and meant that a missed shot gave a letter to your opponent instead.

My brother Joe was a better shot than I was. Two years older, faster, stronger, better in every way. So we started employing trick shots instead of straight up shooting for the basket. No, now you had to spin around fifteen times or ricochet the ball off the planter or perform the layup with a blindfold on. These shots were less about skill and more about luck and abiding by the rules of the shot. And since anything can become easier with practice, we had to mix it up a lot, discarding old tricks that were no longer baffling our opponent, keeping them off-balance and always in danger of falling splat on the pavement.

Poetry is like that. Master a trick shot, even if it's the only one you can do, and keep dazzling your opponent with it. More importantly, if they can't make the shot, they get tagged with an H, even if the reason the shot involved bouncing the ball off her own head was just one person's way of keeping the game interesting, of preventing the Joes of the world from simply trouncing the Julies.