The brunt of my classical training in creative writing is in poetry, and it just wouldn't due to publish (yes, someday, I'm getting to it, shut up) Orphans with a poem-fragment in it that wasn't, you know, good. The poem I refer to is one that must evoke a sense of worldliness and a distinctly masculine sexual viewpoint. My placeholder is:
Stretch’d before my eyes,
the radiant tie of your heart to
mine.
In the palm of this hand
blood. In the other,
a puddle of pearls.
Tomorrow brings naught but crimson.
But tonight the moons are up
and you are beautiful.
Okay, yeah, there's the reference to the plural moons for an "it's not Earth" nod, and the goofy semen image. But "stretch'd?" Who talks like that? Stilted, randomly archaic and dumb.
Yesterday this occurred to me, instead:
Launch a ship from my harbor heart
Fleet and fine.
Solid, sleek. Mast and plank
Drenched, adrip but never sinking
And all sails full beneath the sun
An arrow in the sea between us.
If that doesn't make you want to have passionate, urgent sex with the person who wrote it, I don't know how many moons orbit the planet you come from. Such yearning! Such lusty saltiness! And best of all, its author has never been to the ocean or seen a seafaring vessel (in the book, not yours truly, that would be silly). Success!
