I scored a short sabbatical.
I gorged on torte, Sacher vittles,
Post-Paschal shorn, sacrificial,
And poured port, not sacramental.
Didn't write
Late at night
Tunes to blight
amiright.
I forged a short,
It was too short. . . .

I was drivin' in my car,
And a song came on the radio:
". . . .a Spell on You"--
More, do more!
This loud tune fired my 'magination
To abuse with his shouts' propagation:
I could pen more, more, horror!
Screamin' Jay,
Then thought: "No way!"

I'd abort the sabbatical,
I'd end the short sabbatical,
Start to write
Late at night
Tunes to blight
amiright.
I'd abort torts,
Postpone tube's "Court". . . .

Torpid, I'd toured my TV,
Tube's turds turned by brain to jelly.
Zounds! Writing scourge urged me,
And I called on my muse, who, grumpy, awoke;
She came and then addressed me,
Evil twin of Euterpe:
She would exhort me thus: "Sport,
Jay, Jay, Jay!
That's what I say.
Now go away!"

Pre-post-abort sabbatical,
Probed in my torts grammatical:
Tried to write
Lines just right.
Tried each night,
Rhyming rite:

Went to rhyme a sound for "girl":
"Churl": I had been there
And "whirl": done that,
Then I made my way to "burl,"
From felled tree.
Maybe "pearl"; "curl"? Hackneyed,
Lazy. "Hurl"'s weak--
Homophone's "week". . .sneak a peek, peak, pique.
Guess I'll resort to my forte:
Jays, Jays, Jays
And my old ways:

Trite puns, sex tropes,*
Tiresome lex. gropes,
Tirades. . .vex mopes.
I, cant-flex dope,
Post scabrous dogg'rel,
Prose scatalog'cal.
Pose satirical.
Tiring footnotes. . . .


* [I just love Wikipedia to avoid keying in tiring footnotes] In linguistics, a trope is a rhetorical figure of speech that consists of a play on words, i.e., using a word in a way other than what is considered its literal or normal form. Comes from the Greek word, tropos, which means a "turn." In literature, a trope is a familiar and repeated symbol, meme, theme, motif, style, character or thing that permeates a particular type of literature; the word can also connote "clich�." In the Medieval era, troping was a compositional technique. There were two basic types of tropes: textual and musical. A textual trope involved the assigning of a new text to an existing musical melisma (technique of changing the note [pitch] of a syllable of text while it is being sung). A musical trope was the insertion of new notes into a piece of music, creating or extending a melisma. In serial music, a trope is an unordered collection of six different pitches, what is now called an unordered hexachord, of which there are two (complementary ones) in twelve tone equal temperament. Tropes were used by Josef Matthias Hauer in his twelve-tone technique developed simultaneously but overshadowed by Arnold Schoenberg's.