all-round madman of letters

lgbthistorymonthwriters:

You belong to the stars.
I could tell you a thousand times
tales of depressions and declines.

Manic panics in the smog of human traffic.
Just once I’d like to say you were mine.
Just the once I’d like to feel nothing,

and then a spark, it starts, we’re onto something!
Our legs buckle at the…

Here’s a sonnet by young writer Paul Simpson.

Paul had never tried to write a sonnet before, but I suggested that the poem he’d written (in almost 14 lines) might be one.

Next we looked at the shape of the poem. It has some irregularity in line length now, but we decided to make that work in our favour. The earlier version had more irregularity. Now it looks like half a heart (or a broken heart), which fits the subject matter of the poem well.

We broke the poem up into tercets and a couplet to give it space and let it breathe. Plus the final couplet is a trope of the Shakespearian sonnet, and of love poetry.