Today's prompt was to steal a line from another poem and use it for inspiration/fuel.
This is Not a Love Poem
Please don't compare me
to a summer's day, that's
entirely too cliche, and I'd prefer
you avoid mentioning any gatherings
involving rosebuds.
Stop trying to loosen me with
your language skills.
Just call me a Dover Bitch and be done
with me, because its all so transparent
and I'm stubborn, and frankly
I want more than comparisons of my beauty
to cloudless, starry nights
the gift of gab is nice, but please
everyone is a poet these days.
This poem is a mean, but fun-spirited bit of a mockery inspired by well-known classic poems written by some, as I call them "old dead white dudes". Throughout my academic career, particularly K-12, it often annoyed me that the majority of everything we ever learned was done by some "old dead white dude." I know it is historical, but care not--there is a noticeable lack of female perspective in the "classics" of almost any genre. The poetic world of yore was no exception, and in high school I had the revelation that in fact half those poems, which we now celebrate in huge anthologies, were merely an egotistical, horny, young man's attempts to get down some lady's pants via use of his glorified vernacular--the prowess of his poetic rhetoric. So, this poem is dedicated to the likes of William Shakespeare, Robert Herrick, Andrew Marvell, and Matthew Arnold.
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