Mr. P.’s blues

4

erasure of a page from Samuel Pepys' diary

A rose told my thoughts
and I took to drink,
dined with my troubles—
the money horse,
the rose that brought
a slow hell home.


Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Thursday 23 February 1659/60.

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Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta (bio) crowd-sources his problems by following his gut, which he shares with 100 trillion of his closest microbial friends — a close-knit, symbiotic community comprising several thousand species of bacteria, fungi, and protozoa. In a similarly collaborative fashion, all of Dave’s writing is available for reuse and creative remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. For attribution in printed material, his name (Dave Bonta) will suffice, but for web use, please link back to the original. Contact him for permission to waive the “share alike” provision (e.g. for use in a conventionally copyrighted work).

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4 Comments


  1. This one’s amazing, with or without constraints. Love the last couplet. But the “money horse” seems integral — a powerful suggestion, but the rest of the poem stands up to it.

    Reply

    1. Thanks — I’m glad you thought so. I really sweated over this one. It was Rachel’s suggestion that I make “rose” into a noun and incorporate that. Plus, we were reading about Brynhild’s revenge and death in the Poetic Edda this evening, and I think that’s partially behind the horse and slow hell.

      Reply

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