ManicDDaily

I think it’s Billy Collins who says something about poetry coming from a place where you start out with nothing to say.  (Something like that.)

I should probably not confess that I really have little that can be said (at least in a public forum) this evening.  So let’s try for a poem, a sonnet.

The Inconvenient Body

The body is not of the modern world.
Babies do not nurse only before nine
or after five. ( I remember how mine twirled
a finger against hair, cheek, breast, in a kind
of slow-mo dance even when demons
screamed to hurry up this time, nod off.)
They don’t grow out of it–older humans
too refuse to fall in space allotted,
to manifest symptoms in an orderly
fashion, to fit recovery into
a three-day weekend, but sordidly
succumb to ills that don’t begin to
improve till mid-week (if then), their tick-tock
measurable enough but off the clock.

(I know the last couplet doesn’t quite work but it’s late and last couplets are always the problem with sonnets.  I welcome suggestions.)

This entry was posted on September 14, 2010 at 12:03 am and is filed under poetry, Uncategorized, Vicissitudes of Life. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: difficulties of fitting body on schedule, draft sonnet, health issues sonnet, manicddaily, ManicDDaily draft poem, poetry starting where there's nothing to say, sonnet about the body, sonnet about trying to fit health care into the work week, the inconvenient body