Diagramming Sentences
Did I forget the Ablative?
Love is a predicated verb
With dangling modifiers
Participially absurd
With prosaic desires
.
Love is a word
Monosyllabic, inciting
Alveolar but blurred
Liquid consonants inviting
.
Love is a mood, an appositive, indicative,
It recites imperatively substantive
When launched with a sortie of fricatives
It subjugates the declaratively imperative
.
Love is an active verb, its subject subjective
And conjunctively subjunctive, disjunctive
Its direct object recursively inflective
And intuitively parenthetically presumptive
.
Love is a paragraph in the active voice
Direct address, rhetorically suggestive
But intoned, under the breath, in passive voice
Between the lines reads a voice, passive-aggressive
.
Love is a published genre of speculative fiction
Clauses of claws of labio-velar approximant
Love is reprinted as micro-non-fiction
Punctuated by sighed ellipses...of malar contentment
.
Love is more difficult to diagram than sentences
Of life-without-the-possibility-of-parole
A life of tandem attachment and attendance
Whose sum adds more than the parts to the whole
.
Rhyming the morphemes of codependence
More pedantic than calligraphic italics
More serious than the expected consensual transcendence
More predictable than the font of the chagrinned and the tragic
.
When love's regrets pronounce resentment imminent
And one begins to feel its message denominative
Each lover strikes out to be independently dissonant
But cannot escape becoming the predicate nominative
.
Love takes no prisoners—only direct objects
Objects indirectly, objectively captured
Actions of commission on selective prospects
Bolded and quoted for the infectively raptured
.
When love follows forked paths of least resistance
And comes to fruition in the epic poem risen
A new type of diction comes into existence
A new parlance, per se, lyrically written
.
Love is the sharable word
Monosyllabic, wide, and tall
Towering over the ineffable, unheard
The unspoken that says it all
...
About the Creator
Gerard DiLeo
Retired, not tired. Hippocampus, behave!
Make me rich! https://www.amazon.com/Gerard-DiLeo/e/B00JE6LL2W/
My substrack at https://substack.com/@drdileo
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Comments (5)
Extraordinary. You combine silly and the sublime better than anyone I have ever had the good fortune of reading, Gerard. I think you forgot to the oblique case. I have not seen anyone actually write the word ablative since I taught the novel Midshipman Hornblower at the Naval Academy.
Oh my goodness, so much lies within your carefully crafted poem. I am of an age where I don't even remember diagramming sentences….I especially loved these: A life of tandem attachment and attendance Whose sum adds more than the parts to the whole Love takes no prisoners—only direct objects
Like a breath of marvelous ways one can love poetry, literature, humans and everything else lovable 🥹💕
I was the weird kid who loved to diagram sentences. Really like this.
If I pointed out every bit of genius in this, we'd be here all day, so I'm just gonna' say I love it! (Classify that approproately.)