[RCL]

Off the bone pile:

Sonnet Stanzas*

Within my room, I work to finish lines
that might support the stanzas of a sonnet,
and try to dovetail them as an octet.
But there are crucial problems with my rhymes
before I even smooth the fourth—such signs
of instability, beyond mere nit,
requires an innovative retrofit,
to square the verse with classical designs.

But then the lady whom I hope to woo—
not Will’s or Petrarch’s—spells my stanzas’ doom:
You’re pazzo if you think these dives’ll do!
I cannot fret, for she gives me the clue
that rhyming June and moon may cure her gloom
and canonize us in a sonnet room.

*In the Italian language, a stanza is a room. And pazzo means crazy.


Losing the Art of Love

There was a time when poets sang of love
without embarrassment, when versifiers
happy at their trade were gracious liars
in measured sonnets. They’d imitate a dove,
an owl, perhaps a dawn-drawn bird above,
who sighting human beauty soon desires
to mate his heavenly might with earthly fires
of passion: begets a paradox of love.

But tapping keys that text or tweet romantic
notes is so archaic, old-school, stilted
that songs of love, once tender or ecstatic,
are elegies about the lost or jilted.
Raving in rhyme about a love that’s new?
Postmodern ironies evaded you.

Nonce Sonnet? He's on It!

My muse and I design a sonnet,
Italian-ish; its resonance,
we plan, will generate nonce sense
from carefully cobbled rhymes on it.
Bonnet nicely echoes on it:
we like a sky blue one’s adornments
of little blooms with flower scents,
but some readers ask, What’s on it?

But then my muse, curses on it,
growls, whines, barks and coughs
up sonics. Mentally in circus tents,
insane, we juggle lines for laughs
on the tightrope of this so-so net,
and wavering howl our nonsense.


A Play Pen

A poet’s pen at play
shapes sound as if it's clay:
It measures sonic spaces
modulating paces,

turns senses into tropes,
when styling losses, hopes,
blessings, caustic curses,
puzzles, comic verses.

Its light and serious fun
at times inscribes a pun,
pens icons of our breath
in scripts defying death.

Arse Poetica

Epics chart a culture’s mind
in sprawls of history and wit—
their redolence rides passing winds.

The lyrics are much smaller songs
leaking just a little wind
perfuming feelings as they’re sung.

Dramatic verse can be perverse,
digest the major characters’ wind,
their offal odors at times a curse.

An Arse Poetica is art
releasing powerful rank aromas
as contrails of a horse's fart.

Symbol of a poem’s source:
It's Pegasus, of course of course.

These make an appearance in My Miscellaneous Muse and elsewhere.