Norm Pollack has introduced this variation on rhyming, metrical poetry, at Poem Train this month, calling it star-crossed. He cites four basic rules, which I summarize here:
1) The subject must involve a 'frustrated' [ 'star-crossed'
] love theme. It's narrative or thrust should involve that touch of tension and non-fulfillment. 2) It must contain some metrical pattern that repeats throughout the piece, though no particular meter is specified.
3) There is an xcxc xgxg xkxk . . xzxz / or . . . zz rhyme scheme [ x = unrhymed or optional rhyme. ].
4) There is an additional rhyme picked up from the word or sound preceding the last word in each succeeding line in each stanza... so that the rhyme scheme might look something like this:
..........a..x
..a......b..c
..b......d..x
..d..........c
..........e..x
..e......f..g
..f......h..x
..h.........g
etc.
Note Norm's example, if that is not clear (where I've highlighted rhymes in his second stanza and closing couplet):
Combing Through
Night's moon glow accents salt-blond hair
and bonds with gentle hands which flow
bewitched while combing through, beyond
the hue of golden strands aglow.
He drapes them 'tween his fingers, soft
he lingers lest his love escapes
dove-shapes then weaves, an abstract whim...
a sultry act..his brush of nape.
The static shock of feeling her,
the stealing strokes near climactic
the fear that when the tide recedes
this bridal nymph becomes aquatic
replacing combs to patterned hairs
as mer does part, sailor despairs.
© Norman S. Pollack
And here's my own first attempt:
Paperwork Prostitute
My coat-of-hearth loves poetry
above all else… so is it fair
my wits must languish thus, un-free,
extinguishing my fire? I glare...
upon another bed of notes,
red-eying through a banal task,
morainal rubble… hate this rote
I'm fated to repeat. I ask
again why I'm compelled to wright
to salve some bureaucratic need?
Hot static sparks now blur my sight
as slurs come forth I must impede.
My time I've tithed to prostitute
and writhe through tattered sheets again.
What cheat would leave his wife to shoot
his life with ink? All virtue’s drained.
© MLee Dickens'son 02 Feb 2007
Give it a try!
deLightingly, Daniel J Ricketts
