User:Labombarde/Poetry Couplets

Poetry: Couplets

This Wikibooks subpage will contain couplets and notes about couplets, arising from personal daily exercises as described for writing and reading poetry. See Exercise 2: Your turn to write couplets.

All of these couplets are intended solely as personal daily exercises. No matter how much time is poured into any couplet, no matter how many revisions any couplet undergoes (such revision itself being yet another exercise), no matter how self-contained I work to make any couplet, no matter whether or not I eventually transfer any couplet over to any other exercise (e.g., to act as the repetons in a villanelle), no matter anything: here, in this context, each and every couplet is meant solely as an exercise, like the stretching a player does to prepare for the game, versus the game itself.

     Pure desperate need:
     I felt it: I peed.

That couplet invaded my dreams upon sleeping the night after I wrote the first draft for this day's content on one beer too many. Not very poetic, perhaps, although anyone who has felt that intense urge of waiting too long to stand in line for a space in the one public washroom would be happy to tell the most romantic poet a thing or two about the line between plain "want" and blunt naked "need." In my dream, I settled on this couplet after early drafts playing "real grief" against its "relief" without so crass an indication of the setting. Labombarde (talk) 09:11, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

     Daily practice
     is like swallowing cactus.

This couplet emerged from an exercise I conceived this morning during drafting of content about perfect rhymes, "cactus" being the sole perfect rhyme I could think of for the daily "practice" I recommend.

     It's possible to rhyme without cliché
     while having it still said your special way. 

Upon launching my own Rhyme Dictionary, starting out with words that rhyme with "bay."

     My dreams last night roamed locked outside the tubes.
     My work today won't need to see the cubes.

Accurate, and picks up off a rhyme pair that has a timely personal relevance. Past that, this couplet probably can't reach very far, even were I to try to tighten it up. Although trying to do so would not be an unproductive exercise. Labombarde (talk) 14:30, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

     Someday I'm going to lose my poise
     and shoot that goddamn fucking noise.

Pardon the language, but it was my way of losing poise immediately, with the neighbor's dogs getting on my nerves this morning. Labombarde (talk) 15:17, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

     Free to run, Blue used his liberty
     to climb up high inside our Christmas tree.

Then when Susan heard suspicious noises and went to investigate, he instantly knew he was in trouble, so leapt down to the floor from two thirds of the way up the tree. Labombarde (talk) 17:58, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

     The earthly beauty you choose not to show
     won't show up where it's chosen you should go.

Just saying: to have it there, show it here. Labombarde (talk) 17:58, 2 December 2009 (UTC)