The Mania Explainia  (A Modest Sonnet Cycle)

Sonnets? But why? Are they not a bore?
Did they not die out with the cavaliers
Or fade away in rune font times of yore?
Nay! They are here and cheer the eyes and ears!
Undisciplined verse lacks clever timing
Its untutored beat is ever a shame
But sonneteers with glorious rhyming
Jot glamourous thought for immortal fame!
When formless poems seem so poorly wrought
Sonnets gracefully tell their tales
And will not leave the reader so bestraught
Like those all too common free verse fails.
Melancholy denizens…rejoice!
Your night is lit with a clarion voice!

And because...

My mind condenses impulse into thought
Which I then consider worth jotting down.
What might, by this procedure, be brought
Beyond preventing yet another frown?
There is some glory in triumphant wit!
More so than a mere mechanical fix.
The joy is not just to make things fit
But to do so from an eclectic mix.
From scatterbrain into ordered refrain,
Like atoms cooling into crystal,
Tumbled wordage is flumed into a stain
More compelling than a brandished Pistol!
The passage from sword to plowshare is clear
When it is lit by The Midnight Sonneteer!

Or because...

Without drama nuance is overlooked,
The squeaky wheel gets the grease you know!
But dodgy lies can get us Donny brooked
And that's just not a sonneteer's tableaux.
Though the drab conventionals are in charge
With limp whips of banal sarcasm,
It's perspective, not dread, we should enlarge
And have stoked with enthusiasm!
So fly, fair sonnet, out among the spheres
And waft yourself through the midnight skies!
Declare to all virtuous sonneteers
To ignore the creeps that criticize!
It's time to regain the risqué beret
Viva the rhyming, nocturnal hombre!

And also because...

The better marks of civilization
You may think insignificant at first
If influenced with love of privation
Or that all but the rich deserve the worst.
Diogenes as well dug the simple life
And I could sleep in a tub if I must,
But to thrive through inevitable strife
A poet's shelf could use a bronze bust;
Some candelabra for Liberace,
Nancy's china with air force coffee pot,
And all the finery of Versace
Could be had by selling one rich dude's yacht!
So it's a kindness to milady's purse
To compose only penurious verse!

And...

Midnight Sonneteers will have opinions
Which should be laced with some measure of wit
To distinguish himself from the minions
Who may otherwise just think him a twit!
But wit, I've read, shows likeness in unlike things
And is for poets a wonderful force.
But to the bourgeoisie it never quite clings,
Therefore...viva concordia discors...
Which proves to that me scatterbrains have worth,
But try proving that to bankers and crooks!
They only care if their wallets have girth
And not about reading virtuous books!
Money is boring for a mind that teems
And even a bum has wit in his dreams!

But especially because...

Everyone has desires and concerns.
Don't imagine they'd have time for mine!
But lots of thinking so uselessly churns,
Then torments the brain and dim witted spine!
Such angst could use more lateral routing
To dodge obsolete caveman reflexes.
Then no more will we engage in shouting
At modern, surplus, techno perplexes.
A mind is as Mother Nature ordains
Its weakness to some a strength to others!
Consider that when a father complains
And blames human flaw on the mothers!
So, I'll take a sheepskin in old poetics...
But call the degree..."Applied Dyslexics".