When your poem looks up at you with those wide adoring eyes
it makes you want to slap her pretty face and pull her hair,
then make her strip and force her into some formal disguise.
A peek-a-boo Petrarchan teddy’s standard evening wear
around here—at just fourteen lines, it’s barely long enough
to cover up her volta—once the table’s been cleared bare,
the dessert dishes licked clean and packed away. Then you get tough
with her: the interrogation light, the wooden chair,
her sobbed I don’t know anything, her Please, I’ve had enough
(those aren’t her safewords, though); your Do I look like I care?
You’ll spill your guts in broken couplets by the time I’m done.
At parties you’re sweet, loving, and polite, the perfect pair:
who’d guess at the sick fun you have when you get her alone?
She, dressed up like a whore in a sestina-corset; you,
making her crawl iambically across the floor’s cold stone,
refraining as long as you can from manhandling those two
spectacular refrains of hers—a perfect rhyme indeed!
Black-hearted villain, sir, forcing a villanelle to do
such things: repeating lines entire, or ordering her to read
herself while you lean back and watch. But then, it’s also true,
dominating your sweet lyric’s not the only thing you need—
Sometimes perversion gets inverted: she’s on top, and you
wear the handcuffs and the bag over the head. Sure, you’re the poet.
Still, sometimes you like it best when she tells you what to do.
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