‘Love is a Whore’ comes (if you’ll excuse the pun) next in the Personification series after last week’s ‘Love is the Nurse’. From care to caress in just seven days. A series of poems should play like a symphony: light and shade, calm before a storm, “there should be sunshine after rain” (‘Why Worry’, Dire Straits).
“Just remember, the sweet is never as sweet without the sour, and I know the sour.” – Vanilla Sky, 2001.
This sonnet depicts sensual love as a whore – an embodiment of sensory and sexual stimulation. Because this whore could be either (or both) genders, it made sense that this personification of love should be “a hermaphrodite”. And “high-class”? Well, being a bit of a snob, I found the concept of a “high-class” whore more alluring than one providing services between two wheelie bins in a car park out the back of a Wetherspoon pub.
Love is a Whore Love’s a hermaphrodite and high-class whore Whose perfumed sent is cocaine up your nose Whose unzipped flesh unhinges your locked jaw Whose every sway dictates where your gaze goes. Love’s dressed undressed or dressed for your delight In threads that dredge up long-forgotten gems Glimpsed by a junior diver with keen sight But ignorant of links ‘tween roots and stems. Whore Love’s song’s sweeter than a siren’s psalm And its plump lips electrify taste buds Love tingles skin like seas of Tiger Balm And a monsoon, turns arid bush to floods. This Love’s intoxicating opium Its addicts are left senseless, blind and dumb.
Really like the marine elements here – the diver now stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea (of Tiger balm) and being remorselessly pulled into a stasis of sensory pleasure.
Thanks Will. Your insightful comments are really valuable; they help me understand how various elements/aspects of my sonnets resonate.
Are sonnets nearly always about love? Is that why pop music is nearly always about love? Could you create a sonnet using this lovely data project?
http://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs100/students/project11/
I believe most sonnets are about love. However, there are plenty that aren’t.
Commonality with pop songs could be explained by the defining impact of love on the human experience. And the desire to share that impact.
Finally, I could create a sonnet using the fascinating data project you suggest. I could use it to create more than one. I don’t yet have a third or fourth theme for the collections in this project. So thanks for sharing.