Unrhymed metered fourteen-liner. My muse wants to kill me!
Tactical Cat-tricks
written Tuesday 4 March, 1 hour, tweaked today
You think I don’t discern that I’m despised.
No, no, o Food, I’m perfectly aware.
I’m not the dog for which you pine. Big deal,
you disappoint me too. Disperse pretence:
you feed. I eat. Pray don’t aspire to more.
Impersonal near-tolerance at best.
You teach me tricks, despite my playing dumb—
I train you in return. Performing ape!
On shoulder-top I’ll pilot you downstairs,
perfect the steering motion of my kneads;
I’ll pioneer an armour-piercing stare,
pervade your work with rump and scattered pens,
and moisten up your fingers with my jowl,
and howl, and howl, and howl, and howl, and howl.
Fun new word of the day: pye-dog.
So yes, my muse. I remark in a discussion on WF that I like endrhymes, and that while I have seen plenty of crappy poems that become enslaved to them to the detriment of sense, I consider these bad workmanship and no reflection on the tools themselves.
Annnd so, proving that muses are bitches with sick senses of humour, Galia announces (gradually over a night and a morning; she’s like that) that my poem for the (previous) week is an unrhymed ‘sonnet’. It wasn’t, you’ll note, that I couldn’t think of rhymes and said screw it; the thing announced itself that way from the off.
I had the last line of this one first, and thus a good idea of the narrative, and let the rest take its time arranging itself.
The old iamb. pent. fits so well with my thoughts that I actually struggle not to fit one thought/clause/sentence per line. I see other writers who can split sentences haphazardly and prettily around their linebreaks, and worry that I can’t. (Galia says this proves that hounds are ungrateful bastards.)
First person to spot the ‘easter egg’ in this poem (edit: dayumn, Zenbie’s fast) wins a poem about a subject of their choice written in their honour. To form and meter of their choice if I can, but I reserve the right to wriggle if it’s one I can’t work with. No!—no, this isn’t a scam to get you to give me ideas for this week’s poem! What do you take me for?
