Your windows are dark.
I realize that implies that I miss you and I do.
But I also could, with access to you,
Grow used to not feeling unfaithful to
Be home and know you’re home and not call you
Or slighted to receive no call from you.
I don’t know how we can achieve such ends,
Remain such trusted confidential friends
And excise our wonted co-dependence
Avoiding too much injury and repentance,
But hope we’ll remain where’er our path wends
Friends as karma or providence intends.
The above may allow the inference
That I’ve not been fantasizing of you,
Which would be inaccurate, and untrue.
Hmm. I pretty much just meant to say the first line,
But then considered that alone
might inhibit your search for Le Plombeur or allow
prospective guilty feeling if you’ve already found him,
So I almost didn’t say it at all. Then
counted syllables to see if it was iambic pentameter:
Close enough for a touch of tinkering, and four more lines
Of cautious metered further disclaimer and exposition,
then I considered that that might imply
I have met and seduced La Plombeuse (I have not
though still struggle with previously-mentioned crush), but
by then with respect to the then merely imagined Sloppy Sonnet,
it was on. So there were nine more lines to write.
I had pretty much blown classical rhyme by then anyway,
so played a little. And there you go, babe –
(when I imagined writing to you this morning,
it was “hi babe” that triggered an earlier episode of the above
wave of recursive inhibition, babe being somewhat intimate) –
your very own (not quite a) Sonnet!
Sorry it isn’t more romantic: break
my heart good (but please don’t) and maybe
you’ll get a bevy, but by then it’ll be too late
For the romance to do anything but sit there all still and separate.
Now (depending where you cut) it
might not even be a Sonnet anymore.
Just a modern free verse catastrophe.
~c. 2007