Do idle hands do the divell's work?

I too dislike it. . .how about the use of odd and gratuitous sexual details to shock the audience out of its stupor?

Dan, I positively defy you to (in this day adage, at this pint in time), to identify de odd (and sexual) tails that might still shock a torpid audience.

I should have said "try to shock the audience out of its stupor."

Hermetic references
 

An item that I rather liked was the one on size reversal :

The despair
of loving may lead to long plane rides with
little leg room, may lead to a penis full
of fish, a burning chicken, a room filled
with a single, pink rose. Funny, how
we think of it as a giant rose,
not a tiny room.

Apart from the prosy wording that leads to 'leg room', I like the salmon and the final size reversal that resumes with a different use of the word 'room'. That rose v. room part is to me the best, and here I depart from the compiler's scorn.

What stretches my galluses is the 'burning chicken'. Unless it's a code blue cornball sexual allusion, it's a private call to an event of no enormous relevance that's known to one or at most a few readers. BORING.

You choose : a flaming catamite or a bad meal while attention was being paid elsewhere to maybe a rose? Either way, it fails to gruntle.

Following up on Maryann's. Or leading up on it. Whatever.
I'm adding a title, and annotations. Feel free to join the party.


"Dear Half-Hour of My Life That I'll Never Get Back Again"

I am wormwood. I am gall.
I am supposed to use them all,
these "moves", clichés, etc.
But why. For what. A bet or a


Annotations:
Title: #3 (Abstract epistolary: using "Dear [abstraction or common object]" in title or first line), #18 (The very long title)
L1: (I am X, I am Y--from Stephen Burt's essay)
L2: #14 (Explicit references to poems, especially the poem in question)
L3: #28 (scare quotes), #5 (use of "etc.")
L4: #7 (ending a question with a period)

I'm not sure "guilt" is supposed to attach for the use of any of these "moves." e.g., ending a poem with a question. I find nothing wrong in Yeats conclusion of "Leda and the Swan."

WRITING MOVES

I fake to the left with an adjective,
then dribble up the field,
then pass off to Mike Metaphor
whose meaning is concealed,

then criss-cross near the goal posts
with Chiasmus -- then I score a
goal with Catachresis
as I'm cheered by Anaphora.