[John Whitworth]

The Year of the Bear Speccie Competition is asking for a monorhyme, and some of you responded. I wonder whether you know any other examples of this form that aren't just silly. I've found a charming one by Dick Davis, which appeared in the Hudson Review. It is called 'A Monorhyme for the Shower' and can easily be googled. I would print it here but I'm not exactly sure about the copyright implications. I need a ruling from wiser heads than mine.

I wrote a Bear monorhyme and, trying to tackle the competition that asks for a poem on Stone, found myself writing another. Somebody on google says that Theodore Roethke's 'The Sloth' is a monorhyme but it is not. Do any of you know any good ones. Here is my 'Stone Variations'. Sam Gwynn suggests it ought to be called 'Stoned'. But there is a deep meaning in there somewhere and if I don't myself know what it is... Well, I have entered it and when I win I hall tell you what it means.

Stone Variations

He moved by night. He went alone.
He crept through corridors of stone
Into her reveries of bone.

He’d drawn a blank. The bird had flown.
His friends were fled, his cover blown
And this time he was on his own.

In Peter’s Chair the Pope was Joan.
She cursed him in an undertone:
You reap the crap that you have sown.

He wouldn’t listen to the crone.
He heard his own testosterone.
Out there beyond the panic zone

The night shone sharp as silicone,
A scattering of starlight thrown
Across the void of the unknown,

The wind became a sousaphone
Beneath the howling of the drone,
His homicidal chaperon.

Her wildernesses overgrown,
Her staunch, indomitable moan,
He guessed, though he was never shown.

He moved by night. He went alone.

[Holly Martins]

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

Around the grave blows white confetti,
a wedding day in January,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

A church in Birchington-on-Sea,
his stone beneath a chestnut tree,
she said she liked his poetry.

Around the grave blows white confetti,
a wedding day we did not see,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

And here she kissed me suddenly,
and said how much she wanted me,
and I’d be hers if she was free.

So little time, two weeks or three?
I said too much, too stupidly -
and was alone in February.

Around the grave blows white confetti,
a wedding day I did not see,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

[Roger Slater]

IF I RULED THE WORLD


My feet? They would go shoeless.
My sister? She would poo less.
My brother? He would drool less.
(They both would boo hoo hoo less).
My classmates? They'd be cruel less
(and treat me like a fool less).
My teachers? They would rule less.
My hair? I would shampoo less.
My folks? Not quite so clueless
(and certainly uncool less).
My chores? Well, quite a few less
(and not just one or two less).
My homework? I would do less
(since I would go to school less).

[John Whitworth]

Holly and Roger, you brilliant people. And Sam - of course Sam - has coruscated no less, monorhyming away on another thread. Eratosphereans bloody RULE!

[Janice D. Soderling]

I thought this thread on monorhymes was confined to bear themes. So I started another thread. But it got lonely there, so I deleted it and came here when I saw that Roger and Holly were doing well despite not bearing up. Is that OK, John?

I was thinking about my old friend (in the figurative sense of the word) Stevie.

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/421.html

So here is a monorhyme stab in the dark a la Stevie.

No Taint on Me

way after Stevie Smith

Perhaps you find it quaint
that I should write a ditty about my husband's liver complaint.
You might even say, from a poetic stance, that I may'nt,
but that is because you ain't
so familiar with his drinking habits and I am, hotshot, should you acquaint
yourself with the facts more closely and exercise a little judgmental restraint
you would plainly see that he is not, but I am, a saint.

[Martin Elster]

Here is a monorhyme I wrote 4 years ago.

NIGHT THOUGHTS

As I walk down these dusty roads with not a soul in sight,
Strange thoughts drift down into my mind from an unearthly height
Where moon and Mars, the clouds, the stars, the silence all invite
Delightful ponderings, as well as angst about life’s plight
On a rock which round a flaming orb forever is in flight.
(Men thought the orb went round the rock. Were they all blockheads? Quite!)
While some are downright frightful, and a few are recondite,
The thought my pen just caught’s so mild, I doubt if it will bite:

Now what is it that people mean when speaking of the night?
Night is when our nearest star has disappeared. It might
Have traveled to some antiworld. Perhaps it was some sleight
Of hand that made it vanish. I would likely faint from fright
Were it to keep from rising in the morning. I’d turn white!

At dusk the manmade lights come on, some dim, some blinding bright;
Elsewhere there are lightning storms displaying Nature’s might;
And manmade storms — the wars that cause the fighting folk to fight.

Fanatics on the planet, thinking only they are right,
Will fight about some dogma or some theory that is trite,
Liquidating liberties they’ve not the right to smite!

Well, now I’ll head on home to bed (I’m hoping I’ll sleep tight).
At dawn I’ll head to Flanders Field and fly my sunny kite.

M. J. E.

[Michael Cantor]

Here are a few old monorhymes of mine. The first was published in the The Cumberland Review, and the second in Iambs & Troches - both journals are long since defunct. I wonder if there's a message there?


The Disappearance

There were no kids, the dogs are dead, and we’re
completely out of touch. Old friends lived near,
and now or then I’d get a call and hear
that one had seen her, sitting in the rear
at some designer’s show, or sipping kir
with groups of those young men who just appear
at every function, slim and cavalier,
and that she still looked good – but slightly queer,
and was not aging well – and I would fear
that she had asked for me. But year by year
my thoughts and interests moved from there to here.
The friends are gone – no longer volunteer
small updates on her sightings. Would a tear
or two in private now be real – or insincere?


Above Fat Papa's Bar in Casablanca

Café on the veranda: Ilsa sleek,
her hair now set off by a silver streak,
as beautiful as ever, still a chic
and polished avatar of high-boned cheek.

The room appeared as if we’d spent a week
in bed instead of just one night – the reek
of sex and flat champagne, two flutes, all shriek
of carnal, sweat-drenched, sweet reunion; pique
my appetite for more.

................................. But she seems bleak:
“It won't work, Rick. You've lost the old mystique,
and turned into an aging film-crazed geek –
a droning and obsessive one-note freak.”

The French doors close, but not before I speak,
“We'll still have Paris, kid, and that was magnifique!”


And here's one which, mirroring the action of the poem, starts as a monorhyme, but eventually breaks free:


Tour de France

I think of what it’s like to team with Lance
for three weeks through the peaks and flats of France
and have no chance; to ride with worker ants,
a mere plongeur, a windbreak to advance
another’s goal; to pedal with your pants
piss-drenched each day, and then – just when the trance
of pain plateaus – to catch a sideward glance,
of praying mantis eyes and limbs that dance

past in an instant: I know I’d want to prance
in yellow once; dream that, perhaps today,
I bolt the peleton, slash through the pack
and pull away – a savage, swift attack
that stirs the crowd's, "allez" - and shrug, and say:
“C'est pour la France - et pour egalite!”

[Roger Slater]

And here's a very old one of mine which I had the consideration not to try to publish anywhere, lest I kill off the journal in question as Michael has done:


ANONYMOUS TIP

I knew who wrote me, though it was not signed.
A friend who wanted only to be kind
but never noticed that his words maligned
me more than all my enemies combined.
A man who'd been my guest, politely dined
beneath my roof, but in his note seemed blind
to how his words might place me in the bind
of having to react, though disinclined,
to what his words had planted in my mind.
I trusted her. Our lives were intertwined
with love that God's best angels had designed
and eighteen years of marriage had refined.
My friendship, not my love, was undermined.
I burned the note and left my friend behind.