Sonnettics

The world was young when man created God
When man created God the world was new 
And filled with things by which all minds were awed
Twas awe which filled all minds, and awe which grew

It grew until eternity was filled
A paradox of awe beyond the minds
The minds of man from which all reason spilled
The type of reason every poet finds 

The poets who compose the Word of God
The Word of God, a paradox of awe
Perfection of eternity is flawed
And yes they find perfection in its flaw

Perfection's flaw, forever God and man
The poets know ‘tis not some cosmic plan.
--
Antithesis is not a word you hear
In any tale of how it all began
The opposite of what is crystal clear
Exists where deepest darkness seeks to span

To span the thoughts opposed to all sublime
Antithesis appears where poets start
A simple couplet knows it needs to rhyme
To find a place in lyric poets’ art 

A simple lyric poet is a myth
Simplicity is not a path to tread
Each iamb that appears to man forthwith
Should be expressed and not just simply read

Aloud the poets share the sounds of art
Which comes from deep within each beating heart.
--
Enkidu placed his hand upon his breast
He knew that he had found a pulse to touch
And deep beneath his warm and hairy chest
His heart expressed his poetry as such

A hairy man, as wild as was found
In distant lands where stories weren’t yet born
He let his heart proclaim its joyful sound
And poetry would never be forlorn

It only needed somewhere to be shared
It needed someone else to feel it pulse
A friend who listened, yes a friend who cared
Whose heart would beat like his and not convulse

Convulsion like antithesis was wrong
They had no place within Enkidu’s song.
--
Enkidu sang a song of life and love
Its beat emerged from words inside his heart
Its beat was like the soaring of a dove
The little song became Enkidu’s art

A friend would feel his song like drops of rain
Like rain that kisses earth that’s parched and dry
His words were music friendship might attain
Like clouds of love that linger in the sky

Enkidu raised his head to sing aloud
He spoke his words; he sang his little song
The music flowed; it made Enkidu proud
He wondered if a friend might sing along

Enkidu felt the joy of every word
And in his little song, his joy was heard. 
--
The song was heard by Gilgamesh, the king
For Gilgamesh was drawn to songs of love
And love is more than just a simple thing
A gift for man below from God above 

True, Gilgamesh was more than just a man
His mother, Ninsun, more than just a God
She heard his dreams as only mother’s can
And showed him how his life was never flawed

She told him, listen for a friend that’s true
A friend that might seem coarse or rough to some
And Gilgamesh in dreams found what to do
He knew a friend eventually would come

That day Enkidu’s song came to his ear
And Gilgamesh heard friendship, loud and clear.
--
A song of friendship passed from friend to friend
Is like a river full of life for all
It seems as if it flows without an end
It seems as if it heeds a higher call

A song that calls to everyone that hears
Becomes a path to friendship all might trod
Enkidu and King Gilgamesh faced fears
Together they became both Man and God

And yes, it’s true that Thou Art God as well
And Thou Art Man with friendship’s gift of peace
The songs that you might sing or stories tell
Reveal that friendship’s true and will not cease

Like friends of past our stories plant the seed
And nourish every soul with word and deed.
--
Inanna, Queen of Heaven, gave a gift
To Gilgamesh, the king of mortal man
A drum and sticks to help his music lift
By beating them as only mortals can

King Gilgamesh made music with his friend
Until the gift was dropped, they fell below
King Gilgamesh knew where they would descend
To Netherworld, a place one should not go

Enkidu went to find his friend’s lost gift
And thus got trapped forever in the place
The Netherworld, where darkness doesn’t lift
Where Gilgamesh could never see his face

And yet their friendship never could be lost
Although they knew it bore a heavy cost.
--
The heavy cost of friendship must be paid
When separated from a friend that’s true
And though Enkidu knew he might have stayed
It wasn’t what his friendship said to do

King Gilgamesh was also in such debt
And so he sought Enkidu’s darkened shade
The soul that lives no more, but can’t forget
It can’t forget the friendship life had made

Enkidu’s shade told Gilgamesh the truth
Of Netherworld and why he shouldn’t come
King Gilgamesh believed his friend, forsooth
Although the things he learned were often glum

Beyond the life or death or flesh or shade
A friendship’s strength is where true friendship’s made.

I. [Race medals on wall or just race medals]

Two thousand nine was quite the year for me
I finished Boston twenty-six point two
And Ironman, the race, I did all three
The swim, the bike, the run, my ego grew

Caught up in all my training  I forgot
That life was more than just some storied race 
But Kona’s Ironman was what I sought
I didn’t think that I would fall from grace

The grace of one more medal on my wall
From one more race as hard as it might be
I didn’t think that I would ever fall
But fall I did and how I fell you’ll see

They saved my life when I was nearly dead
 A TBI persists within my head.

II. [Hospital image in bed]

My helmet saved my life but brains will bleed
And scars will form in place of what we know
New neural pathways form to meet the need
Of “normalcy” a “normal” brain might show

My normal was my racing, which was lost
Paralysis replaced my “normal” self
I had to learn to walk again, the cost
Was more than unused shoes upon my shelf

I had to learn to eat without a tube
I had to learn to walk without a cane
I had to learn I wasn’t just some rube
I had to learn to use a broken brain

A broken brain that used to be so bright
I learned my “normalcy” was this: to write.


III. [Hand writing in notebook]

What else but racing had I done before?
Before my TBI changed everything
I’d written sonnets. Could I write one more?
One little song a troubadour might sing

Resiliency requires that I write
Again like I had written once, when whole
Not whole? I know, I seem a “normal” sight
But I have lost and found a lofty goal

My goal’s now this, to write in storied verse
The tales of all that I have stood to live
I’ve learned that life is more than to rehearse
And life has many stories left to give

Thoreau said I should live before I write
I’ve lived through death so Henry, let’s not fight!

IV. [Human heart with "iamb" emerging from it like a song]

My name is more than just an anagram
Sonnettics is the way I choose to live
A sequence made of sonnets is the dram
I drink, I write. It’s what I have to give

Iambic lines sound like a beating heart
A beating heart sounds like a subtle drum
Familiar pulses fill my veins with art
I hear them find their words and watch them come

They find their way around my TBI
They find a way to bleed out on the page
I hear them talk, at least I think they try
The words are gods whose confidence is sage

The wisdom of familiar words to sing
Is how I’ve learned to deal with everything.


V. [A plowed field with iambic words or a verse of pentameter… maybe the first line of this sonnet]

Resilience is a sonnet that I write
To help my brain find pathways it once knew
Resilience won’t be easy, but it might
Be how I learn to do the things I do

Like walk or write a sonnet: here’s one now
I know we’re in the middle of a tale
A tale of sonnets, dirt before the plow
The plow is me before you to regale

Regale you with the hope of what I plant
I hope the seeds I scatter here will grow
And then I hope the harvest won’t be scant
True hope is like a secret that I know

I know to share my life in metered verse
And hope it doesn’t go from bad to worse!

VI. [Some image of a poet..maybe you in a kilt… on a cloud]

I know it doesn’t seem a lofty goal
Like running Boston Marathon or such
A poet pays a dithyrambic toll
To write in sonnets (or to write too much)

More sonnets than the Bard of Avon did
More time to write than Dante spent in hell
If hell were fourteen lines in which we hid
The price of all the metaphors we’d sell

The poet might descend in hopes to rise
To rise to heaven to entreat the Word
Then metaphorically I might disguise
My soul with verses God might find absurd

But God knows how to laugh, a hearty sound
And laughs as all the angels fly around.


VII. [Brain]

I saw them fly to Earth and pick me up
I saw them hold me back from life’s last leap
And every card they dealt me was a cup
Each dealt me an emotion I should keep

For TBI had stripped emotions clean
The cards were my prostheses, mine to hold
I held them to my chest, each one I’d seen
I might have lost such precious veins of gold

The gold of my emotions, unrefined
Was mine to keep in neural pathways new
Emotions had been lost but not my mind
I found a purpose, what I had to do

I had to find the stories I could tell
And Dante-like I had to go through hell.

VIII. [Brain surrounded by stars]

The hell of finding pathways ‘round my scars
The scars that blocked the pathways of my brain
But even in such hell I saw new stars
That marked the pathways where I stood to gain

To gain a poet’s life I’d been prepared
To gain a life at all, I didn’t die
At times it’s true that I was very scared
It’s not some phony story to deny

Denial is any easy path to walk
But I had run as hard as I could go
If medals on my wall could somehow talk
They’d tell the world of challenges they know

The challenge now is writing songs of art
And finding stories deep within my heart.


IX. [Scott writing poetry with medical team in the background]

I think that most good poets start with doubt
I found my doubt that year I almost died
I learned that words could not be lived without
As there I laid with no one by my side

Oh, there were doctors, nurses, quite a few
I love them all, for by their art I healed
They fixed my poet’s brain, but never knew
The poetry my broken brain concealed

Within my mind, my poetry was lost
I journeyed there through seas of doubt and pain
I paid the piper, such an angry cost
So that I might be whole and write again

They couldn’t heal my doubts, that job was mine
Such doubts constrain, confuse, and yes, confine.

X. [Scott writing. Fates in the background.]

The poetry I sought was to unbind
Like Kubla Khan to Xanadu I fled
The sacred river Alph I sought to find
In words that I composed while still in bed

I spent my time with words; each word was god
I rearranged these gods to make them sing
A little song that mortals might enjoy
I found what my mortality might bring

To bring the knowledge needed of the now
The now my chronoception can't conceal
Resiliency is more than Fates allow
And so I write in hopes I might reveal 

Reveal to all who read or hear and feel
That poems too are gods of words that heal.


XI. [Scott writing in hell]

Let’s focus on the sonnet now to see
If songs of words with some familiar beat
Might amplify my own resiliency
Or if they should have left me on the street

Do iambs come in groups of more than five
Are neural scars poetic in my brain
I guess I’m glad that I am still alive
Regardless of the death of unseen pain

The volta of my life, a TBI
Is part of the great sonnet of my life
I write my little songs, at least I try
Regardless of the scheme of hidden strife

It doesn’t make a lot of sense, oh well
Like Dante I still write while deep in hell.

XII. [Scott writing under a rainbow]

The hell I’ve come to know and overcome
Is finding life in sonnets that I write
So why then write? Is writing sonnets “dumb”
They may not heal my brain, and yet, they might

Resiliency in hell that no one sees
Is more than just the writing of such verse
And normalcy is more than just to please
The people who believe that they’ve seen worse

So, worse than any hell that I’ve been through
Would be to stop composing little songs
I write, I write, I write; it’s what I do
Pentameter is where my soul belongs

My heaven of pentameter is this:
A broken brain that’s found it’s normal bliss.

XIII. [Sonnettics in the middle of a circle. The circle has hearts around it or is made up hearts brains]

Chiasmus is returning to the start
It’s like a circle showing us the way
I think I found the way through this my art
The art of sonnets since that fateful day

Iambic blood goes pulsing through my brain
And through my heart, my soul, and through my pen
The neural pathways I propose to train
Are sonnets I will write and write again

Familiar as my name, I’ve found they help
To bring me back from places I have gone
A bitch called out to this poetic whelp
Like Xanadu called out to Kubla Khan

The similes and metaphors are real
When I compose the sonnets that I feel.

XIV. [?]

I am my song, my pulse, my turn, my scheme
If that constricts your mind then you should leave
I’m more than just a vision or a dream
In which some simple acolytes believe

And yet, I’m not a temple on a hill
I’ve seen too many temples come and go
To make pretenses which I can’t fulfill
Pretend I sound like somebody you know

I am iambic meter at my core
Pentameter I place where it belongs
A sonneteer and yet I’m so much more
Much more than I express in little songs

I’m fourteen lines, and yes, a volta too
You think you thought you knew me, now you do.