they speak whatever’s on their mind
they do whatever’s in their pants
the boys i mean are not refined
they shake the mountains when they dance.
*– e. e. cummings

Teenage Lotharios at the Dance

Along the gym wall they are lined.
These young men of the teen-aged kind
are young and beautifully designed,
but they aren’t subtle, and they aren’t kind.
They speak whatever’s on their mind.

They pose, they preen, they strut, they prance.
They walk by girls and joke and glance,
at intermission make their advance 
and if they score a date, perchance,
they do whatever’s in their pants

For them, romance is a slow grind.
For years, they’ve plotted and they’ve pined.
so after  girls are wooed and wined,
it’s very likely they will find
the boys I mean are not refined.

But, if girls can put up with their rants,
beguile the knight, repel his lance,
 stay firm in their “wont’s” and “cant’s.”
and get them back inside, by chance,
they shake the mountains when they dance.

 

 

 

The prompt for NaPoWriMo today is to write a Glose or Glosa Poem.The glose or glosa is an interesting Spanish form. The basic premise is that you quote four lines of poetry as an epigraph from another poem or poet. These four lines act as a refrain in the final line of the four stanzas written by the poet. So the first line of the epigraph would be the final line of the first stanza, the second line ends the second stanza, etc.

The most common convention is for each of these stanzas to be ten lines in length, but NaPoWriMo is not holding us to this rule. There are no other hard and fast rules for rhymes or syllables, though line length is usually consistent within the poem (so the epigraph kind of sets the line length).

*From “the boys i mean are not refined” by e. e. cummings: