I'm changing my Sonnet. Now it's 43. We had to read these random sonnets for Shakespeare today. I should have known my professor wrote them. You really have to have heard him talk to get the proper inflection that just adds to the hilarity. This guy named his son Lear. He's written 1,100 sonnets. 1,100!!! He wanted to write one a day for a year because he'd heard someone else did, then he got on a roll and did it for 3 and a half years. I really like him. I do believe I shall name my firstborn son Gideon, to pay homage. Here, I share the joy:
White Chocolate
White chocolate, oh oxymoron foul!
No cocoa bean did bless your candy vat.
We chocoholics taste you and we howl.
What are you? An albino slab of fat,
Hydrogenized and sweetened past remorse
Then peddled with hyperbole and fraud
To unsuspecting chocophiles of course
Who'd rather gargle liver oil from cod.
I've gnawed on better plastic in my day!
More flavor can be found between one's toes!
Perverse confection, fit to throw away
Unworthy of my chocolate sniffing nose
White chocolate, a joke not semi-sweet
Your coming means our end is near complete.
Love's Lungs
Back then balloons were not an easy matter.
In ancient times they had to kill a goat,
Extract its large intestine (or its bladder),
Some lumberjack would huff, the ball would bloat.
Today some wealking florist turns the gas,
And presto, a bouquet of mylar orbs!
Farewell to those rites of manhood to be passed
When gifts so swelled no time nor sweat absorb.
True valentines their own balloons must fashion,
Must find a cow or rhino to dispatch,
Must find the guts to well express his passion,
To show his love that florist's met his match.
She'll know your love by just how well you blew:
Believe me, this procedure's tripe and true.
Spam
Third cousin to a pig and twice removed,
It oozes, goopy, from its squarish tin;
Thick film conceals the lard with which its grooved,
Intestines pureed mottle its pink skin.
Would ancient man have glorified the spam,
In pictographs preserved its conquest sure?
Or would they shrug at its smoot texture, bland--
No boxy graphic to make spam endure?
In industry the spam is thrift itself:
No bones or organs spill aside as scrap.
Once salted, lives for decades on a shelf;
Discerning palates know its kind from crap.
Maligned, despised, yet all the while consumed
If spam's eternal, earth itself is doomed.
Shop Vac: A Sonnet
No kitten Kirby I, no devil red;
Such toys are made for sniffing dainty dust
A shop-vac I, by two horse powers fed
Inhaling concrete boulders is my lust.
Beware, don't leave your children in my reach
Nor in my range allow the family mutt.
Wet gunk or dry, my nuclear nozzle's speech
Persuades all matter enter in my gut.
Does gravel, nails, and muck fill your garage,
Embarrass you and cause no end of danger?
What if a stray ten-penny nail did lodge
Deep in the insole of some passing stranger?
If Santa brought you me, he brought you luck,
The present that will always, gladly, suck.
Mucus (not a good one to read over breakfast)
Lugubrious and patient as he slimes
His dark and viscous weight within my head.
He tugs his bitter taffy mass in crimes
Of pressured pain and dripping dread.
A hundred tissues bruised with blasting blows,
And yet he lingers, stranding strands of crust;
Gelatinous stalactites, grainy flow,
Replacing brains with miles of muck and must.
In sour thickness smears my throat and lungs,
His wiggling jelly clogs each passageway
I cough up gooey golf balls on my tongue;
I rasping pleas my alveoli pray.
My phlegmy enemy, you shall not run:
With antihistamines I end your fun.
Goodbye, My Love
I trusted you and now it's torn apart:
My happiness, and worse, my trusty truck.
You broke my new transmission and my heart,
And now cash skeedaddles with my luck.
Oh, Cherry, one part reckless, one part divine
You turned my motor once I do confess
But now there is the matter of this fine--
I'm dubious our gears again will mesh.
The wilted pistons are as good as dead
And so is my affection, dear, it's true
I picture your sweet face beneath my tread
These things aren't fixed with kisses and some glue.
Forget the church, I'm going off to Napa
And as for you and me--it's in the crapper.
-Gideon Burton (who, upon my recitation of Sonnet 73, asked me if I'd acted before. Good teacher.)
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2 comments:
That's good stuff.
I thought a sonnet was characterized by an "if, then, so" conflict and resolution. So do these qualify? or only on the fourteen line, ababcdcdefefgg format requirement?
Besides all that, I thought they were very enjoyable. Esp. the one about white chocolate. All I can say there is "Amen!" Now if only he could convince my husband the foulness of twizzlers . . .
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