Sesquipedalian Sonnets

We lurch into the octogesimal quadrant, where the intensive lexical maximalism achieves a state of parasitic liquefaction and alchemical transmutation, far eclipsing the jejune lyricism of any Elizabethan predecessor.

Sonnet LXXVIII: The Helminthic Hagiography of the Soul

The cestoid coils of my entangled grief,

Perform a peristaltic dance of shame,

Seeking a scolex-anchored and brief,

Inhabitation of thy sacred name.

I am the endoparasite of thy grace,

A nematode within the visceral light,

Mapping the lumen of thy stony face,

In the anaerobic silence of the night.

Thy love is the intermediate host,

A trophic level of sublime decay,

Where the metacercaria of the ghost,

Await the predatory light of day.

No anthelminthic logic can expel,

The vermicular heaven of my hell.

Sonnet LXXIX: The Athanor of Transfinitude

Within the athanor of my distress,

The albedo of thy silence starts to calcine,

Until the nigredo of my loneliness,

Is sublimated in a drastic design.

I seek the lapis, the philosopher’s stone,

In the putrefaction of the mortal breath,

Where mercury and sulfur, in bone,

Enact the coagula of living death.

Thou art the rebis, the hermetic twin,

A syzygy of arsenic and of gold,

In whom the solutio of my sin,

Does macrocosmic mysteries unfold.

Let Paracelsus chart the elemental spheres;

I find my tincture in thy acid tears.

Sonnet LXXX: The Cryogenic Ossuary of the Ego

The absolute zero of thy cold intent,

Inhibits the molecular and the vile,

Until the kinetic energy is spent,

Within the isothermal of thy smile.

I am a superconductor of despair,

A Meissner effect of repelled desire,

Floating in the liquid-nitrogen air,

Above the extinguished and ancient fire.

Thy beauty is the Bose-Einstein condensate,

A singular and macroscopic wave,

Where quantum fluctuations of my fate,

Find a cryogenic and silent grave.

In this stasis, no entropy can reign,

Save the frozen architecture of my brain.

Eighty sonnets are now vitrified in this maximalist reliquary. Having already exceeded my intention for fifty, we approach the final twenty toward the centenary. Hence we escalate to seismological heraldry or pathological linguistics.