So, I'm taking a verse writing class. The first assignment was to write something using some sort of formal restraint, either meter or some kind of classical format, like a sonnet, villanelle, sestina, what have you. The constraint had to some how reinforce the content of the poem. For example, the repeating lines of a pantoum could reinforce the cycle of despair of a grieving mother, or something. I decided I wanted to write in iambic pentameter, so that's what I tried to do. Here for your reading pleasure (or displeasure) is what I came up with.
Aquarium
But in her dreams she wished to have married
a connoisseur of literature, wine
and pussy. Like a Parisian
perhaps, who could, in lyrical words speak
of the Rhone valley with elocution.
But what she got was Xbox games
and comic books and stacks of anime
that needed rescue from the cracked floor of
the basement.
“Top Shelf,” he laughed to himself.
The box of baseball cards displacing her
great grand mother’s set of wedding china.
“Those won’t rot,” he said with a smile
But in
Her dreams she wished to have security.
The basement crack continued seeping. Drop
by drop the water came into their home.
The crack grew wider (it was but a hair-
line fissure), became something she could put
a screwdriver in—(that didn’t stop the leak).
“My husband, our foundation is crumbling,”
she said. “I think our house might be sinking.”
“I’ll fix it,” he said.
But still the water
came in. It slowly filled the house. The hole
became a dinner plate.
The day it came
from downstairs up, she found her spouse, his arms
embracing boxes he was moving to
the attic. “X-Men issue number one
is worth a lot,” he said.
One day they woke
and the first floor was eight feet deep.
It passed the windows, passed the doors.
Had they, the next door neighbors, looked,
they might have spied the cat floating.
The house was an aquarium.
Their son, forgotten in his bed
room drowned while in his sleep.
“I’ll fix it.”
The last resort was in the attic.
Her spouse, surrounded by this things,
“It can be fixed. I swear it can,”
he said before his lungs filled up.
She held her breath and down into
the indistinct waters she swam.
The crack had swallowed up it all.
The water from below was cool.
She wished to find the bottom source
so she swam down into the cold.
The light above, the world outside,
grew dimmer, colder, farther down
until the last faint speck
of light blinked out.
She wished
to find
the source,
but it
was dark
and she
could not
find down
from up.
