Sonnet

I wrote four and a half sonnets this week, mostly painfully cloying- it took a lot of fooling around (and the first 3 poems) to get past the sing-songy iambic pentameter that was rattling around my head when I started.  And then I continued to write in sing-songy iambic pentameter anyway.

I don't like writing in such popular forms.  They make me nervous because almost anyone who has completed secondary school can pinpoint exactly where you've screwed up (or at least thinks that they can).  Also, because of the plethora of amazing sonnets that already exist, there's so much pressure that all my attempts just start to feel irritating and overdone when I reread them.

That said, I did actually come out with one with which I was mostly satisfied, eventually.  I find that forcing ideas into iambic pentameter and rhyme tend to lead me into archaic syntax, which reads kind of strangely when the language is not particularly archaic, but make of it what you will.  Suffice it to say that I am less unhappy with this one than I am with the others.

The final couplet was a real struggle- "together" throws the rhythm off in the first line.  Unfortunately, try as I might, I couldn't come up with another word that meant what I was trying to say at all, even with utter disregard to syllables.

The last mistake, the perfect biting flaw

in every hope that trickled from the start

to morning, March the 18^th- then you saw

the peppermill, thrown freely like a dart,

the arc so clean as it sailed through the air.

The gasp, the beat, sharp crack as it came to

collide beside your head, your fearblown stare-

it startled me, the pain on which you drew.

Your face, its beauty pale outlined in shock,

pressed me to grasp at last what I had lost-

the wonder that you’d brought my life, my rock,

I’d wrecked it then, my hopefullness the cost.

Alone together for so long- my heart,

my bones don’t remember alone apart.