Wicked Wednesday

Gentle Reader!

Has it already been a week since we were happily fooling around with Double Dactyl poems?  It hardly seems possible.  And yet, since the blizzard promised to NYC by the Weather Gods is supposed to fall on Thursday, and right now it is cold as a witch's mammary but at least the sun is shining, I guess it's Wednesday once again.  Which suits me down to the ground, because I am slated to accompany the Adult Offspring (as I suppose I must now start dubbing the erstwhile Teenager, now that he's 18) to see Captain Picard and Gandalf cavorting at the Cort in a matinee performance of "Waiting for Godot."  Yes, yes...TDF had tickets.  There are some benefits to being unemployed and free to go to the theater on the spur of the moment on Wednesday at two. Try to contain your envy, and please don't ask, "Which one played Godot?"

Let's revisit those Double Dactyls, and then next week perhaps we will move on to Lascivious Limericks.  The structure of the poem is simple, and I have copied the outline of How To Do It from last week's page & it appears below.  I also promised a friend that I would follow up last week's ditty about that double-dactyl dynamo VLAD-i-mir NA-bo-kov with my own Double Dactyl ode to Little Red Riding Hood:

Through the wood, through the wood
Little Red Riding Hood
tripped off to Grandma’s with
goodies to eat


till a transgendered wolf
omnivoraciously
gobbled her up from her
hood to her feet.

Gentle Reader - grab your pencil - you're on!

A Double Dactyl poem is similar to a limerick much of the time, because it is usually comic in nature, as the rhythm lends itself nicely to bawdiness  Here are the rules:

- A double dactyl has six syllables, and the beat of the sound when it is said aloud is like the beat of a waltz: ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three

- Each poem is eight lines long.  Two stanzas, four lines apiece.

- Each line is double dactyl meter, except for the fourth and eighth which are two beats short (DUM-da-da-DUM).

- The first line is nonsense (Higgledy-piggledy, Humpety-dumpety, or just a sing-song two-word rhyme - whatever sounds good and silly)

- The second line names the person it's about.  That person's name should be a natural double dactyl:
 EM-i-ly DICK-in-son, WILL-iam De BLAS-i-o, HANS Chris-tian AN-der-sen... you get the idea.

- The fourth and eighth lines have a strong rhyme; other lines need not rhyme.

- One line in the second stanza (usually the sixth line) must be a SINGLE six-syllable, double-dactyl word.