Ms. Priss on Iambic Pentameter

Ms. Prissy Perfect pads into the room
tender on soft paws but don’t forget
she hides her sharpened claws inside those paws,
her weapons when she thinks my writing’s off
or words I choose are not quite up to snuff

“Your meter strays from strict pentameter,
I doubt your next revision will be better.”
And then she licks her paw as she muses
“All you have are scratches on the paper,
There is no art I see here,” purrs Ms. Priss.
“Best stay with what’s important, like iambic
and rhyme of course, but first, I need attention.”

I sigh and reach to pet her furry head
and then get back to working on my poem
Will she get bored and curl onto a pillow
and let me do my art uninterrupted,
this old grimalkin* critic by my side?

Check out this article on how to address your self bully You Don’t Suck at Life: How to stop believing your inner bully.

*”In the opening scene of Macbeth, one of the three witches planning to meet with Macbeth suddenly announces, “I come, Graymalkin.” The witch is responding to the summons of her familiar, or guardian spirit, which is embodied in the form of a cat. Shakespeare’s “graymalkin” literally means “gray cat.” The “gray” is of course the color; the “malkin” was a nickname for Matilda or Maud that came to be used in dialect as a general name for a cat (and sometimes a hare). By the 1630s, “graymalkin” had been altered to the modern spelling “grimalkin.”   – from Merriam-Webster 

Graphic is an original painting done in watercolors and ink.

 

 

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