Poetry Thursday: Thine in Truth and Fart

I realized that I had ignored the Poetry Thursday prompt yesterday about body parts. So I penned a new sonnet to comply.

I'm not requiring myself to write good sonnets, simply five-finger exercises in form. Once in a while, as in "Schism" or "Be Quiet My Head" (previous posts), I may manage to write something worth preserving for an Andy Warhol second.

Sonnets are usually serious but rhyme can take you into light verse if you're not careful as in the closing couplet below. Yet gas is no joke to me; in Mexico I was in the worst pain of my life with repeated amoebic dysentery. For days I seriously wished for a colostomy, had visions of disemboweling myself to end the pain.

In the context of my personal experience the poem might come over as serious--if the reader knew this background--but the poem won't fill that in--so it's doomed to be comic, or at least sardonic.

I know of no poetic scale that allows for the labeling of tone. I suppose below I think my tone either sardonic or wry.


Brother Ass

My nose is nearly Aboriginal,
Wide with no bridge. My eyes have bags,
Or better, luggage. My belly’s a dirigible
Bloated by dysentery (and it sags).
My shoulders slope, my chest is without hair
Unlike my belly and the works below
My hands are somewhat small but can squeeze air
Into smaller and smaller cubic molecules.
My legs are strong but short for 6’6”.
I have a low center of gravity,
Good for balance on a Viking ship
Or to foot the neck of my depravity.
St. Francis called the body “Brother Ass.”
That donkey's almost killed me with his gas.


At Two Kilobunnies,

Thine in Truth and Fart,

CE