Some Sonnets?

Willie Shakespeare wrote a whole lot of sonnets. I'm not just quoting the mid/late 90s pop super-trio LFO, Shakespeare wrote at least 154 sonnets and certainly, at some point in your life you were forced to read one or more of them.  We're all familiar with that type of over saccharine, punch-drunk, cheesy-pie type of love sonnets that Shakespeare (and other poets) doled out, unintentionally enabling the rom-com spoon-fed youths of the world to believe in this sort of flowery, declarative love, fueled by near pathological infatuation and peppered with sighs. 

Deep breath

While Shakespeare did write scores of that type of poetry, let's be fair, he was most likely just trying to get laid. Also, it's clear that he was aware that many of those poems were shallow and offered only a narrow and fleeting view of what love is. Sonnet 130 "my mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun..." reads like a parody of some of his earlier sonnets, talking about how his mistress may not be traditionally beautiful in any way, but that doesn't matter. It sends the reader away with a much truer understanding of what it is actually like to be in love. In fact he offers another sonnet that is a very mature take on love, though probably just as over-used as any other. Here's a good line from that one, "Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom." Pretty sweet, eh?

To the point. 

Before I had met my wife, I did what I'm sure many have done before me, which is to try and figure out what my future wife would be like and by extension what married life would be like. To that end, I wrote five sonnets in a semi-Shakespearian style that explored pop-culture dating taboos, like farting, using the toilet, or getting sick in front of your boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, whatever that so often serves as sitcom fodder. Tropes that arbitrarily trickle into our every day life, which I think drastically impediments our ability to be comfortable with those we love. 

So here's to not living a life where you have to hide your farts from your wife.

 

1.

He could not tell just when the smell had hit,

But knew at once from whence the odor blew.

His lover on the couch beside him sits

Shifting discreetly. She struggles to hide

This gentle indiscretion from  his eye.

E’en though he knows and she knows that he knows,

They simply let the moment pass them by

And watch’d the television side-by-side.

But as the wafting cloud there dissipates

Into the air above the happy two,

A sound escapes and ‘gainst the silence grates

So that who dealt it cannot be denied.

   To him, she’s loved e’en more for breaking wind

   Than if she only ever held it in.