everything is shrinking

or is it just my thinking

something about drinking

haven’t got an inkling

maybe Skeltonic verse

is par for the course

guess we could do worse

don’t call the hearse

yet

that Hemingway cartoon

crashed like a lead balloon

did no one see

or do they all hate he?

but I got 320 followers

so could not be jollier

and

with two more days to go

in this NaPoWriMo

think I’ve done O (K)

and to finish will be yay!

 

Day 28’s NaPoWriMo prompt was to write a poem using Skeltonic verse. Don’t worry, there are no skeletons involved. Rather, Skeltonic verse gets its name from John Skelton, a fifteenth-century English poet who pioneered the use of short stanzas with irregular meter, but two strong stresses per line (otherwise know as “dipodic” or “two-footed” verse). The lines rhyme, but there’s not a rhyme scheme per se. The poet simply rhymes against one word until he or she gets bored and moves on to another. Here is a good explainer of the form, from which I have borrowed this excellent example:

Dipodic What?

Dipodic Verse
will be Terse.
Stress used just twice
to keep it nice,
short or long
a lilting song
or sounding gong
that won’t go wrong
if you adhere
to the rule here,
Now is that clear
My dear?

This year’s poetry month has felt like more of a challenge to get through than last year, with my other writing commitments bubbling away in the background, so I thought I’d just go for rather silly doggerel today.

Not actually sure if it’s skeltonic or not.
Think I usually write like that.
What-ever. 

The image is a detail from one of  Sir John Tenniel’s Alice in Wonderland illustrations I grabbed off the internet  … I think those pics are royalty-free these days anyway. ?