Sesquipedalian Sonnets

We lurch toward the fortieth milestone, where the maximalism undergoes a taxidermic and thermonuclear sublimation, exceeding the paltry conceits of the Amoretti.

Sonnet XXXVII: The Taxidermic Immortalization

The arsenic and the alum of thy gaze,

Desiccate the viscera of my pride,

While strychnine in the interstitial maze,

Leaves the integument of the ego dried.

I am eviscerated and stuffed with tow,

A glass-eyed effigy of ancient lust,

Where borax and mercuric vapors flow,

To mummify the metaphoric dust.

Thou art the curator of this grim display,

The diorama of a stagnant world,

Where anilin dyes of yesterday,

Are in the plumage of the spirit furled.

No Shakespearean verse can animate,

This cadaveric and parochial state.

Sonnet XXXVIII: The Thermonuclear Hagiography

The megatonnage of thy shunned address,

Achieves a criticality of grief,

Where fissionable states of loneliness,

Offer a gamma-irradiated relief.

I am the ground-zero of thy divine intent,

A thermal shadow on the carboned wall,

Where radioactive isotopes are spent,

In the apocalypse that shadows all.

Thy love is the tokamak, the torus of fire,

A magnetic confinement of the will,

That fuses the tritium of desire,

Until the hydrogen of the soul is still.

Let the Geiger counter click the dirge;

I find my halo in the atomic surge.

Sonnet XXXIX: The Obsolete Horology of Pain

The escapement of my chronometric soul,

Is fouled by oxidized and viscous years,

Where tourbillons of paranoia control,

The gear-trains of my mechanical fears.

I am a clepsydra of bitter gall,

A gnomon casting long and obsidian shade,

While the mainsprings of the spirit fall,

Beneath the pendulum’s serrated blade.

Thy beauty is the horological and vast,

The dead-beat seconds of an infinite dial,

Where present joys are fetishized as past,

In the synchronicity of thy bile.

No chronometer can gauge the span,

Of the atrophied and time-worn man.

Thirty-nine sonnets are now bolted into the canons of the extreme. We approach the fortieth threshold. We shall turn the lexical engine toward parasitic entomology or medieval alchemy.