Because

How can you, with all that supposed straight talk,
use such stupid lies on him? How can you stay?
How can I, without one good reason to be
here, assume that you’re not just lying to me?

Where can I, inside this empty, angry space,
be as close as I once was, lying by you?
Where inside this soulless shell, our flat, might I
find any scrap or shred of our love, our life?

Why – despite the nights unslept, notes sent, tears cried,
all that time spent waiting on signs that might show
you loved me still – why, given all that I’ve tried –
why must I still keep this love aching for you?

I can see it now: because I loved my dream
more than your flesh. More than the truth, the real you.

The sonnet has three questioning quatrains and a concluding couplet. Lines are Sapphic. This means that each line has eleven syllables (rather than stresses), following the Sapphic metrical structure: Long-short Long-short Long-short-short Long-short Long-Long.

I set myself the challenge this morning as I’m always struggling to escape from my own experience and write with other voices, about other things. The villanelle earlier this week helped immensely. I started reading about sonnets, but was dissatisfied with ‘straight’ Petrarchan or Shakespearian forms.

So I thought, why not try to create a queer sonnet? I picked a metre that doesn’t fit easily with English (which favours stressed patterns rather than syllabic ones). I decided to dispense with deliberate (though not accidental) rhyme patterns as I don’t like them and thought it would be too difficult to sustain abba, abba, cdecde with such a rigid metrical pattern. And as I’m British, I thought we should go for the four, four, four, two formation rather than the continental line-up of four, four, six. (Sounding a bit too much like football for my liking.)

I’m also – quite accidentally – following the approach of Sappho’s ‘Phainetai Moi’, which has a “you”, an “I” and a “he”. And that’s the point: as I have struggled with almost random words to fit the form, an intense story emerged. I didn’t know where it was going, and it was exciting to see the story appear.