So Much for Sameness

It's odd how I can manage to write something with me own noodle that I acknowledge as good and yet still do not like. Case in point is my sonnet from yesterday. Sonnets, something with which I'm very familiar in both my critical and writing practice, come easy to me; I generally feel quite comfortable playing around in their formal constraints. So, I've found myself writing sonnets of late, if only to take my mind off Simone Weil and Martin Heidegger, both of whom, let's admit, can be a real downer in his/her own way.

The first two lines I'm okay with:

I have the habit of calling my brain a mind
as I don’t know the meaning of either word;

Where it becomes problematic for me is in the third line, where, in an attempt to form a parallel of the concrete to the abstract, I reuse the phrase "I have," except this time in a much more literal sense. N.B. that the line originally read

I have a wet pile of pebbles in hand

but upon revision reads

I have in my hand a hand full of pebbles

Neither is really ideal, as far as I'm concerned. The former is vocally smoother, but I like the way the phrase "hand full" deconstructs the idea behind "handful," though I'm not sure the latter noun is evoked in the way I intend. Also, the clumsiness of the chosen line does quite a disservice to my intended parallel, making it seem as if it weren't one at all. The parallel is needed, I think, to give the false expectation that this sonnet will progress in a very formulaic fashion: quatrain-quatrain-quatrain-couplet. If that sense persists, then the enjambment in the 5th line will throw the reader off a bit, preparing her for the long, choking sentence to follow. All of this is tidied up with a nice regular quatrain, a return to normalcy that doesn't quite fit.

all my smooth thoughts do is dirty
the ground until some kind stranger
clears them away, leaving me the duty
to bury the ground again until I die.

I see this sonnet as indicative, whatever its flaws, of how I used to write, say, before I came to graduate school, when generally speaking, I was focused on trying to take complex ideas and distill them into very simple terms. Compare this with what I wrote the day before that, to my mind, says something similar in an infinitely more obtuse way.

finally, something of length to make the long worthwhile

three feet and five and two add up to ten,
but so do six and four. fourteen, un-eunuch
by his manhood, would take four again
a pedophile by his teen age only
interested in eights and six and sometimes
a twat of four and four and four and two.

some times are correct, measured by measure
of sounds singing the outer walls to dust.

this city had the highest walls, the longest
routes to lovers peared and apple bottomed
markets and mark thats and mark this: one day
this all will be a desert to the sight
where Egypt fell – in love with its own paper
maché cones stoned the deafened silence.

This one has faults of its own, namely the way in which the last six lines just kind of hang there, but despite it not being better--in fact, I'm convinced it's worse--I still like it more.