Why?

Now why would this sonnet be about love?

When love has directed me toward the thorns

Unwoven all the things that it first wove

And has made me rejoice far less than mourn

Why can’t a sonnet just be a lament?

A diss track to romance’s modern twist

Poetic attempts don’t equal assent

To allow love’s forceful grasp to persist

But let me explain, love I don’t abhor

I’ve surfed on its crests, I’ve cartwheeled its fields

It might bring pain, but it’s never a bore

Do I want to lose the frenzy love yields?

I’ve chosen: apathy is worst of all

Where’s pride in rising if we never fall?

Monday

Vicenza: Drinking bourbon and listening to songs dreaming about sex. My Monday is envious of your Monday.

Alvaro: Well you're the one I texted about that song. So your Monday had more going on than it knew.

Vicenza: My Monday blushes and bats her eyelashes in response.

Alvaro: Blush and a 'bat? Your Monday is sounding more and more like a Thursday.

Vicenza: Monday dreams often of being a Thursday. She dreams of embodying Thursday's loosening of resolve, Thursday's ability to look joyfully to the future. Getting to be so close to Friday, the hunkiest of the workdays.

Instead, she's left slammed between bittersweet Sunday and lost soul Tuesday. Covered in the world's distaste of what she represents.

Alvaro: It's not a sacrifice she's chosen, but it's one she continues to make. On her beleaguered back grow the rest, each becoming more joyous as they distance themselves from poor Monday.

Like a drab pair of shoes she toils out of the limelight, filling a role that flighty Friday would never have the gumption for.

Vicenza: Yet, if she could only see that her role is an important one, albeit thankless. She provides a service to the world, a certain order that keeps the hedonists from flinging themselves too far from reality, from those who marry themselves to Saturday, the cruel godlike day that promises light and love and freedom but passes so quickly you're left gasping into Sunday.

Monday is the dark new moon, living forever in the shadow of the more popular full moon. Providing us with a fresh start we would rather ignore but so desperately need.

Alvaro: Yet she does boast a secret side, for the true hedonists see Monday not as Monday but as another yawning maw to fill with their favorite poison. She also plays patron saint to those so wedded to their stilted definition of success that she can't even rankle them as she does the rest. At least with the rest she can play villain, but with the workaholics she's just a nameless notch in an ever-lengthening belt.

So she's caught between hate and apathy, and even as the millennia have piled nauseatingly high, she still can't decide which is worse.

At least she gets a trivia night now and again. 

Whiskey

Whiskey, neat.

Whiskey's neat.

Whiskey is neat.

Whiskey'd be neat.

Whiskey would be neat.

A whiskey would be neat.

A whiskey, neat.

A whiskey can be neat.

A whiskey could be neat.

A whiskey should be neat.

Whiskey: neat.

A few more couplets

Breaking the crusty eyed, 4-inch dust blanket bullcrap hiatus haters is inelegant at best.  Still, where there's work to be done, it doesn't due for a working man to let it lie.


She had a quick trigger and sizzling Szechuan thighs.

She had a waist to end a war and turned my brain into a bucket of lard.

She had liquid eyes and a laugh that'd melt butter.

Her words trickled down my ears like otters down streams, and drenched my mind in a surprise waterfall.

She sliced the room in half with her walk and that ass made my heart stop for 3 minutes.

She wears that dress like a leopard in fur and makes men mice.

He made Biggie Smalls look like a toll booth operator and only drank milk with his cookies.

He wrote on the wall until his writing covered the wall and then bit his fifth pen in half.

His fist made the oak desk quake and his voice bit like Arctic ice.

She smelled like hot sunshine and ate with her fork backwards.



With humble mutterings,

Millicent "Bennie" Benjamin

27 Boxes in 15 Minutes

Wistful whisky walking briskly
Tumbling warmth, a welling of my youth
Dwell in my chest, tell me truth:

You are sparse, placid, I'm drunk
At home in my chair.  I can feel your dress,
See it from here, rip it with my teeth
I'll draw Orion on your knee
You'll tell me to guess about that scar.
If only I had a memento
So tactile and bright with life
But I only grasped your hand
Clasped, more like, a fingerprint powwow
No long council, such as our hairs might have
Brown and brown, wiry and flaxen
And while you slept, I'd weave a great knot
Knitting me to you, yours to mine
So tangled it would be, so utterly dense
An elemental nonfiction
With filamental connections
To keep me next to you, sugar

The Alphabet, Part III

Things are getting hairy.  No, not down there, I hit puberty months ago.  I mean the Sasquatch I am tracking.  There are no Sasquatch on the Internet, and that is scary to me.  When absurd loses its meaning we are all Shelley's rowboat: no current current.

I.

I'll intuit a while - itching for inklings -

Sitting high on a pile of Inuit tile

Smile. I think things, I think.

J.

Joyous Hajj just south of Jersey

To abject jub-drowned jurisdiction

Jingoes judged by jilted juries

K.

Jack a whole stack of darkened 8-tracks,

For a lark in the park putting smack into sacks

Crystalline cracks lack the tact of your act

Because even when you are too good for structure, environment and assholes' opinions, you still need all of those things to express the original thought.

- Bullfrog Kauffman

The Alphabet, Part II

After E, the alphabet gets decidedly less friendly.  Consonants come out of the fucking woodwork and you'd better hope you have more than a quarter tank left when you are cruising toward its buxom midsection.

F.

Rough Kerfuffle over a tufted truffle

Enough in the duffle for a fortnight's tussle;

Suss out the fluff before the five-card shuffle!

G.

"Grand Canyon," grinned the gray Cayman.

"A great gallumphing gorge, edged by stodgy green grass,

With ledges as high as the glassy night sky."

H.

Breathy whorls huffed by homestead ranch hands

While threading husks through stretchy, itch-proof conch strands

A shy, overshorn mensch to watch the ashy badlands.

Hellbent on flooding your basement marketplace with everything short of tyranny.

-- Severino the Younger