Heat - Denis Johnson

I just wanted to post the original poem: Heat by Denis Johnson for you to see too. It's in sonnet form, which means a poem of 14 lines, usually in iambic pentameter, which means 10 syllable lines. This sonnet is not in iambic pentameter and neither is the poem I wrote using the end-words of Heat.


Here in the electric dusk your naked lover
tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth.
It's beautiful Susan, her hair sticky with gin,
Our Lady of Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover,
streaming with hatred in the heat
as the record falls and the snake-band chords begin
to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones,
and such a last light—full of spheres and zones.
August,
you're just an erotic hallucination,
just so much feverishly produced kazoo music,
are you serious?—this large oven impersonating night,
this exhaustion mutilated to resemble passion,
the bogus moon of tenderness and magic
you hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light?

Sonnet

At the moment I'm feeling like my life lacks productivity, so I thought I'd share some of my recent creative work with you all. Today.. poems! Wait, before you do that 'ugh poems' face, they aren't free verse yawn-worthy poems, they all have structures, and apart from the sonnet are personal to me. The sonnet was just something I wrote in the middle of the night, I think I'll post that one first. It was constructed using the end-words of Heat by Denis Johnson, which is a really beautiful poem. My sonnet is about how love grows old.

Lying awake next to an out-dated lover

The relentless sound of grinding teeth

And overpowering stench of gin

Spilt from the glass, soaked into the bed cover

Unable to sleep in the crippling heat,

The uneasy thoughts begin.

In twenty years you’ve gained three stones

I’m forbidden from nearing your erogenous zones

The sticky humidity delivers hallucinations

Us dancing, echoing ballrooms and 80’s music.

I dream of dark December nights

Evenings gone by were full of passion,

The forgotten chemistry a form of magic

Lost now, decades on, in August moonlight.