Physicality Imploded:
An Imitation of
Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 18
Shall I compare thee to a
slack-jawed moose?
A tundra beast whose
brain conceives no law
beyond the skull’s
dimensions, despite loose
nobility and tawny hide
scraped raw
in dashes through a
wilderness our eyes
alone have seen. Those
eyes protest the knife
dissevering your torso
from what lies
beneath, but dignity well
known in life
will fail to save you
from a death now spent
adorning brick above my
fire and logs.
A creature bred for vigor
never meant
to hang immobile over
sleeping dogs;
but brief and dashing
lives lived through the skin,
are better lives than
that of those who win.
This sonnet began as a comment on the differences between those who experience life
intuitively and those who experience it physically, and then a moose got involved,
and now I think it's more about how short, full lives are better than long, dusty ones. I tried to model it on Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 18.
I know there aren't a lot of words that rhyme with moose, but what does loose nobility mean? Maybe it just went over my head.
ReplyDeleteI like how you kept your ideas continuous and didn't just stop at the line breaks. Also, I have to know. Where on earth did you come up with the moose?
ReplyDeleteI saw a football player, and I thought he looked like a moose.
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