Sesquipedalian Sonnets

We proceed to the twenty-seventh station of this thesauric pilgrimage, where the lexical tumescence enters the realm of the neurological and the vestigial.

Sonnet XXV: The Neuro-Cartography of Obsession

The arborization of my dendritic grief,

Extends through synaptic clefts of gray,

Where neurotransmitters, in venomous relief,

Inhibit the dopaminergic light of day.

I map the sulci of thy stern disdain,

Within the amygdala’s red recess,

Where myelinated axons of ancient pain,

Conduct the impulses of loneliness.

Thou art the lesion, the infarct of the will,

A lobotomy performed with golden shears,

That leaves the prefrontal cortex vast and still,

Beneath the cerebellum of my fears.

No electroencephalograph can trace,

The voltage of thy unremembered face.

Sonnet XXVI: The Vestigial Reliquary

I nurse the atavistic and the prone,

The caudal remnant of a reptile dream,

Where appendix and coccyx, in shame alone,

Decry the evolutionary and cruel scheme.

We are but biological and brief mistakes,

Palimpsests of primitive and failed design,

Where the involution of the spirit aches,

To reach the anthropoid and the divine.

Thy beauty is an exaptation of the void,

A serendipity of flesh and bone,

By which the telos of the soul is buoyed,

And Darwin’s grim determinism is thrown.

Let the paleontologist sift the marl;

I find the human in thy predatory snarl.

Sonnet XXVII: The Nautical Putrefaction

The scuppered vessel of my sanity drifts,

Through sargasso seas of decomposing kelp,

Where the tectonic and abyssal shifts,

Offer no succor and no maritime help.

The barnacles of stasis clutch the hull,

A calcified and parasitic weight,

While the desiccated and the screaming gull,

Mocks the nadir of my maritime estate.

Thy love is the maelstrom, the corryvreckan roar,

A hydrostatic and lethal embrace,

That drags the shipwrecked to the ocean floor,

Beyond the latitude of saving grace.

In this pelagic and unfathomed deep,

The leviathans of lexicon never sleep.

We have surpassed the halfway mark of the grand climacteric. 

Twenty-seven sonnets are cemented in maximalist amber. Obviously we shall surge toward the thirtieth, perhaps invoking obsolete military fortifications or chromatic aberration.