Smoking at night in my workshop

Vindictive mice among their stolen hours

Too small to seize the hammers near at hand

Fall down in prayer to Vast Rodentic Powers

To speed the Prophecy of Disneyland.

The spiders made of glass and smoky stealth

Attend their nets and wait for juicy fools,

The early catch already swaddled wealth.

They build oblivious to power tools.

So, cob or prey of cob am I, or mouse?

Or should I let that painful question go?

Unique among the night beasts of the house,

I tease the questions: maybe, yes, and no.

The scuttles, scrapes and patters of the night

Bear arguments: I listen with delight.

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Comments

Calliope

18 years ago

I really liked this

Nice use of words,and imagery.like the questions as well ,adds to the atmosphere of where you are.good one poet. Lacy, Where power corrupts,poetry cleanses.

Rob Graber

18 years ago

Ah, a Shakespearean sonnet! Best form of them all, in my book! Line 8 flashes great wit; I'm afraid I'm missing some of the humour elsewhere (Prophecy of Disneyland and glass spiders leave me groping, for examples), but I enjoy this very much.

infinite_dwarf

18 years ago

I agree.....

I agree with Rob - The glass spider reference is eluding me as well. Cracked window-pane, possibly? Nonetheless, I found this to be a very well written piece. Good job, Perry! ~Lynn (Jess K.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ~ "Bush is listening.... use big words!" ~ "Your inferiority complex is better than mine..."

Dasaralle

18 years ago

Wow!

I can learn from this a lot. Great style.

Skumpfsklub

18 years ago

Both first and second

Both first and second stanzas are defective. The first because its metaphor is too sparely outlined, remaining obscure; the second because the descriptive phrase (many of the spiders in my workshop are colorless and nearly transparent, hence 'glass and smoky stealth') is not surely joined as an essential feature of the second stanza's evident metaphor. The third stanza does not hold enough explanatory power to make the mice into religious fatalists, or to make the spiders into robber barons (among other possibilities). The last couplet holds the nut of the truth. I don't have the answers to the riddles, but I enjoy hearing the late night workshop noises that accompany the riddles. This was killtime sonnet #12 or #14, before I reworked it and gave it a title. Probably should have abandoned the sonnet form for the sake of clarity of notion.

Rob Graber

18 years ago

The couplet

For line 5 you might consider something like "The smoky [or "glassy"] spiders, in their silken stealth,"... BTW: I think the couplet is outstanding!