Love Sonnet to a New Post

When, in disgrace with Orkut and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my sitemeter;
Trouble other bloggers, crave replies,
Fisk Paul to be blogrolled by Peter.
Wishing myself like to one more rich in prose,
Features like his, like him with links possess’d,
Wanting this man’s template, that man’s jokes;
With what I most enjoy commented least.
Then, in these thoughts at myself griping
Haply I think of thee, and then my state
Like to a million monkeys at daybreak typing
Writes Shakespeare, or something approximate.
For thy sweet love conceived so perfectly maddens,
That then I scorn to change my site with Scott Adams.

With apologies, obviously, to William Shakespeare. Part of this contest (hat-tip Neha, whose own contribution to the contest is not to be missed).

***

Meanwhile, over at Slate, Robert Pinsky compiles a set of poems about sex, proving that Valentine's Day can make even respectable poets act like hormone driven school boys. I couldn't help but think of an episode Stuart Dybek relates in the latest issue of Poetry:

"In college, the first love poem that I felt written, not for me exactly, but directly to me, a poem I memorized in the way that as a child I'd memorized other love poems - "The Highwayman" and "The Raven" - without realizing that's what they were, was a poem by Auden from a set called 'Five Songs'. Coming from the erotic tradition of Buddy Holly, I must have needed that transition of song. The Auden poem made its own melody:

That night when joy began
Our narrowest veins to flush,
We waited for the flash
Of morning's leveled gun.

I found it in Sound and Sense, the text for the first lit class I took after dropping out of pre-med. I still recall the essay I wrote in answer to one of the questions: what is "the flash of morning's leveled gun"? I said it might be an orgasmic spurt, and received a deserved F, accompanied by the admonition, It's tougher to write something beautiful than to be a wiseguy."