'Lemon' is an alternate metaphor

They breed like flies when I write a killtime sonnet. Handy little beggars, though, that save me a lot of time. On those occasions when the sonnet's worth reworking, those 'ands' are on the hit list. They're handy---and expendable. On the rhyme scheme in S1. I can see how you might read it as AAAA, but It's ABAB. (Consider the pairs of words pat:pact, sat:sacked, fat:fact, etc. The pronunciations ARE very close, but not identical.) The BIG WART in the poem is the deviation at L5 and L7, where the iambic pattern is broken by the extra syllable. I can't think of any way to fix that. Your suggestion about the lion line is a good one. That's the right gimmick to use to avoid the 'and'-glut, that this poem certainly has. In the particular case, though, I thought the line had a nice stink of doggerel about it; it's not a good poetic line, but it is the sort of thing one might think 'kinda poetic,' if one aspired no higher than 'classy doggerel'---which I did then, and still do, kinda. (I'm of divided mind about 'serious poetry vs. accessible poetry'). Still, one day I WILL want to write a serious poem in a seriously poetic way. I might crawl under the bed and wait until the impulse passes. I like the content of this one---and I think I'd like to expand (somewhat beyond the sonnet format) on it. I'll probably stick with form, though. I like filling in the boxes. But I get to arrange the boxes before I do the monkey-puzzle part of poetry-writing-as-I-do-it. I'll go with something less sing-songy. Thanks for the comment and suggestion. The one called my attention to a problem of rhyme I hadn't thought of, and the other's just plain good advice. Perry

Tsk! I overlooked this one, too. It lacks its hundred views---and never mind that my reviewings are mixed with those of other eyes.

Why write another faux comment, you ask? Because the poems I'm doin' that for today have not been visited a hundred times yet---and their 'visits' include a substantial number of 'visits' engendered by my returns to the pieces, and some spurious 'visits' that appear to be artifacts of bugs in the program. So, get used it: I keep recommenting until I feel that the poem has had enough exposure to lend value to the numbers.