Week 2, Day 7: Poetry. Sestina.

The end of poetry week is here and with it the most complicated poem of all. This is the sestina, a poem which I am destined to write badly. Here's a brief description (click here for broader description):

It consists of 39 lines divided into 6 sestets and one triplet, called the envoi. It is normally unrhymed--instead, the six end-words of the first stanza are picked up and reused as the end-words of the following stanzas in a specific order. In the envoi, one end-word is buried in each line, and one is at the end of each line. Lines can be of any single length. Each stanza repeats the end-words in the order 615243.

Yeah. So here's my sestina. It's called "Saturday."



Who would have thought that a Saturday
Could turn out to be so sublime,
When all you do is drink some free beer and a shot
of something noxious called a Redheaded Slut,
and get touched by a few drips of sweat
flying off the neck of the woman next to you, stripping.

Yeah, it wasn't what she expected, the stripping
and what not; it's not how she'd usually spend her Saturday,
but sometimes when the spray of sweat
hits you in the eye you get overcome with that feeling: something sublime.
And while there is nothing remotely like that about a Redheaded Slut,
You have to give yourself a chance to live in the moment whenever you get a shot.

Now, living in the moment for her, "giving it a shot,"
does not mean that she decided to join in the stripping;
even after seven Bud Lights and a Redheaded Slut,
a girl can still hold on to her ideals late on a Saturday.
But letting go and enjoying the presence of other women in the room was sublime
and she even felt running down her neck a drip of her own sweat.

That feeling, the tickling trickle of juicy intimate human sweat,
Will raise hairs and hearts and pulses, giving a shot
of joie d'vivre to the system of anyone, anytime; again, it's sublime.
She thought about this all, as she watched the women, stripping,
wondering whether or not she would consider spending another Saturday
at Rick's Gentleman's Club drinking a Redheaded Slut.

But how can someone ever plan out a night with a Redheaded Slut?
Those are usually the sorts of nights that just happen, with sweat
and hair down--or up--and an open mind and the hope that Saturday
just might be the night where you'll get your shot
to stand up to your fears and emotions and empower yourself to start stripping
them away until you get to that precious irreplaceable understanding of the truly sublime.

All of life doesn't have to be a quest for the sublime,
and it certainly doesn't requiring spending time with a Redheaded Slut
But it is worth keeping in mind the value each day of stripping
away the things we are afraid of and keep us in place, and shed a little sweat
in the process. I think if you keep this in mind, you'll see that you'll have a shot
At imbuing every day with the same glorious possibility as you might have on Saturday.

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The end (and no fucking envoi, i was given permission by someone important).