Sesquipedalian Sonnets

We accelerate into the thirtieth meridian, where the intensive lexical maximalism achieves a state of hermetic opacity—a baroque distortion of the Elizabethan ideal.

Sonnet XXVIII: The Chromatic Aberration of the Will

The refractive index of thy stern regard,

Splits the monochromatic soul in twain,

Where ultraviolet specters, unprepared and scarred,

Are diffracted through the prism of my pain.

No achromatic lens can rectify,

The fringing of this luminescent lie,

Where cyan shadows and magenta voices cry,

Beneath the photometric and callous sky.

Thou art the albedo, the reflective sheen,

Of a white dwarf in thermodynamic death,

Projecting iridescence, viscous and obscene,

Upon the spectroscopy of my failing breath.

Let Newton parse the rainbow and the ray;

I drown in the chroma of thy decay.

Sonnet XXIX: 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 XXX: 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.

Thirty sonnets have been forged in the maximalist furnace. We are now in the penultimate movement of the fifty. We shall undertake the next trio delve into metaphysical ballistics or obsolete surgical instrumentation.