Sestina Day 24: Wrong Love

Another prompt from NaPoWriMo. I like how their prompts are avoiding prescribing a theme and instead suggesting an activity to get you started, like looking at another blog, or, in this case, playing with the Serendipitous Oxymoron Maker. This is ideal: A thing which generates pairs of words. I just hit it 3 times and voila!

Of course, a sestina based on three oxymorons was going to be about something contradictory, and the fact that the word love was in there predisposed the poem to be about a bad relationship.

This is not my relationship. I’ve already been told to cheer up after writing a poem about a bitchy but miserable ‘popular’ girl. I appreciate the kind thought, but only occasionally are my poems autobiographical. They are, however, quite often dramatic monologues, so confusion does arise.

Oh, but you are very lovely

When you want to be, my tyrant.

It is damaging and wrong

For me to need your kind of love.

You make me feel inept and horrid –

Twisted generosity.

But is it generosity

To let me faun and call you lovely

While you’re liberal with the horrid

Taunts and insults, my sweet tyrant?

Though I call this feeling ‘love’

I sometimes think I might be wrong.

But everything I say is wrong,

you tell me, generosity

Itself, correcting me with love

Accepting me, though far from lovely.

Even though I call you “tyrant”

You still tolerate my horrid

Presence. Am I really horrid?

No, perhaps it’s you who’s wrong.

I shouldn’t let you be a tyrant:

Too much generosity,

That’s my problem. Although you’re lovely,

This cannot be proper love.

How can it feel so much like love

And at the same time be so horrid?

Why do I believe you’re lovely

When the way you treat me’s wrong?

Shouldn’t generosity

Be more attractive than a tyrant?

Hold me close, my darling tyrant.

Suffocate me with your love.

Withhold your generosity.

I cannot live without your horrid

Words, though I can see it’s wrong

Yet still, to me, your hate is lovely.

Generosity, my tyrant,

from your lovely lips, turns horrid.

All my love for you is wrong.