Sesquipedalian Sonnets

We proceed to the septuagesimal meridian, where the intensive lexical maximalism achieves a state of hermetic opacity, rendering the Elizabethan idiom a mere monosyllabic casualty.

Sonnet LXIX: The Vauban Fortification of the Ego

I raise a ravelin of petrified tropes,

A bastion of polysyllabic stone,

To shield the glacis of my shattered hopes,

From the bombardment of thy voice alone.

This architectonic and vaubanian wall,

With scarp and counterscarp of deep disdain,

Awaits the siege where lesser spirits fall,

Beneath the ordnance of eternal rain.

Thy love is a sapping and subterranean mine,

A petard hoisted at the postern gate,

Where tunnels of insidious design,

Undermine the ramparts of my state.

Though the citadel is crumbled and defiled,

The rubble is sovereign and unreconciled.

Sonnet LXX: The Xylographic Necrology

I carve thy epitaph in lignified spleen,

Upon a xylographic block of yew,

Where cambium and phloem, in ghastly green,

Exude the ichor of the old and true.

The grain of my obsession is cross-hatched,

A burin’s labor in the stiffened wood,

Where splinters of a spirit—now unmatched—

Are gouged as only dying artists could.

Thou art the matrix, the incised and voided space,

Which defines the ink by what it is not,

The vacuity of thy imperious face,

The blight that the living forest begot.

Let the Gutenberg press replicate the mean;

I print the singular and the terrible scene.

Sonnet LXXI: The Iatrogenic Reliquary of Despair

The trocar of thy glance performs a breach,

Through peritoneal and sacred walls,

Where iatrogenic phantoms start to preach,

In the aseptic silence of these halls.

I am a nosocomial and failing guest,

A pathogen of polysyllabic grief,

Where cauterized desires find no rest,

And anesthesia offers no relief.

Thy love is a scalpel of obsidian stone,

A hemostatic clamp upon the soul,

That leaves the viscera and marrow bone,

Beneath a malpractice of control.

No Hippocratic oath can bind thy hand;

I bleed according to thy stern command.

We have surpassed the LXXI mark. The lexical sediment is now impermeable. Now we escalate toward the centenary sonnet.