The colloquial tone seduced me instantly, and my passionate affair with this poem lasted all the way through the two turns (after lines 8 and 11) and final image. It is remarkable that the author so effortlessly fits the speaker’s story into such a demanding a rhyme scheme (abba/abba). After so virtuosic a display, one can only be certain that the shift to off-rhymes in the sestet (cde/edc/) is purposeful—the lack of chime in the final three lines brings us back to a far less sexually exciting reality and lands us in surprising shifts of setting (game room, middle school).
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