Guest poet db weighs in with some paronomasiac reflections:
She loved my sonnets,
I thought, 'til she said to me:
"Kid, it's all been Donne."
Then he tests the suppleness of the form (& gives us a touch of whiplash) with some envelope-pushing vulgarity (linguistic & otherwise):
bitches hos 'n tricks
thatz all women iz 2 me
(God, I'm so alone.)
What's interesting about the above is the way that the supposedly dominant voice of the first two lines—the internet-inflected tones of today's disaffected youth—gives way in the final line to the conventionally capitalized & enduring voice of loneliness—which, though the poet may try to suppress it (the parentheses here are doing some tense work), is what finally emerges from the constantly-shifting morass of internet-lingo.
In the last haiku of this set, db returns to some good old-fashioned sentiments that surely we the people can get behind (or in front of!):
When she smiled at me
A voice from my heart sang out,
"LOOK AT THEM TITTIES!!!!!"
It's as though db tempts us with the density that lies just beneath the surface of his tersest work—which is remarkably suited to the haiku as form—only to retract it forcibly in numbers like these, which defy our instincts as literary critics (though one notes, even here, the recurrence of the "multiple voices" theme, as the "voice from my heart" offers up a critique of the situation to hand that runs counter to what we—& perhaps db is here gesturing not only toward our readerly expectations but allying us forcibly with the first line's "primary" voice—have learned to expect from cliché like the smile of a [pretty] girl. Smiles & beauty go together under the conventional poetic idiom, but db challenges our received notions of what a smile can signify).
We're pleased with db's contributions & hope to read more of his work in the future.
—c.
