Sonnet thread

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Thanks. I like how it has an octet and a sestet but still uses a Shakespearean rhyme scheme.

I'm not happy with this one, though. I did this whilst bored at work:

The end of this affair is fighting time.
This fighting time is of the end affair.
A meaning's made by how you sound a rhyme
between your ears, between the who and where.
And every time our love's rehearsed, I try
to grab invisible reality.
Your looks, your touch are adequate reply:
you seek a similar subject to me.
It's similar because it's not exact.
It varies more than God and baffles more.
Transcendent simplicity in sex act:
a slit of light that slides beneath time's door.
It could mean nothing or as I suspect,
it might be wants and whims that we project.

I wasn't happy with that last poem, so I revised it:

The end of this affair is fighting time.
This fighting time is of the end affair.
A meaning's made by how you sound a rhyme
between your ears, between the how and where.
And every time our love's rehearsed, I aim
to grab the great intangibility.
And from your looks it seems you seek the same:
a meaning which has no stability.
This meaning's cast anew with every mood
It varies more than God and baffles more.
The sole enlightenment to be construed:
a slit of light that slides beneath time's door.
It could mean nothing or as I suspect,
it might be wants and whims that we project.

Latest sonnet:

Folie à deux

A mental fidget occupies my head:
is everyone I see in love, or sane?
Do sodden streets and cars secrete a dread
in minds therein of losing what's mundane
and losing what's ineffable, as well?
I walk between two worlds myself, and fear
divorce of heaven from a useful hell;
they feel so far apart and yet they're near.

And lunacy's not halved when shared; it spreads
like puddles joining up to run down roads.
We find too many gutters in our heads.
We find sometimes the way to heaven's closed.

For now it seems we have a foolish grace;
if damned, then hell is not a foreign place.

I love it, it's so nice and gloomy

Thank you

It's based on Huxley's idea (which he got via Blake) that heaven and hell are regions of the mind. If love is like a madness shared by two (folie a deux) then the lovers visit those mental places together. I also had this idea that love is sustained by marrying the two opposite states together, that's why I fear heaven and hell divorcing.

The delicate black claw of branches shakes
with awe at dawn the shade of blushing cheeks.
I haven't seen your hopeful face in weeks;
my life's a chore between these sacred breaks.
Your birdsong down the phone is all it takes
for my daft heart to find the clue it seeks
about the way it beats. Confusion peaks
when my affection craves what sense forsakes.

It's unrequited like a childhood prayer;
I have a two-way love elsewhere as well,
but knowing how I feel unfetters me.
To liberate you seems extremely fair
but guilt's imprinted on your every cell;
my vain desires, they cannot set you free.

I like the revision. there is something soothing and familiar in the rhythm.
poems always slow my thinking and help me think more clearly

Here comes the Spring again; it doesn't care
about my dust-obscured emotional
throwbacks; its screech winds strip me bare;
they leave me cleaner but uncomfortable.
My bulky overcoat's not suitable
but nor is pallid closet-dweller meat
to undergo delight that's terrible,
to take the touch of reasserting heat.
Behind the Lenten-ash-begrimed cloudsheet
it sees me rustle, half in love and snooze.
It watches lover-like. It won't retreat.
I haven't got a wisp of an excuse,
except my past that murks about my will -
but Spring's too fierce for even fear to kill.