Broom Hilda by Russell Myers for July 05, 2010

A guy couldn’t get drunk enough to fall in love with Broomie.

No one’s ugly at 2 AM.

Maybe loitering is still illegal where this atrocity is being committed? Pity the guys who have to drink themselves silly to get out of the bar!

After enough booze any girl can be good looking.

“hic”

My taste for women has never been affected in the least by the amount of alcohol in my bloodstream. It is, however, very easily influenced by other contextual things. But that’s always been a matter of kind, not degree, of beauty.

To get me so drunk that my idealism becomes that overridden, I’d have to be dead, and dead men don’t make good lovers.

No, William, and something tells me I don’t want to.

A 2 at 10 becomes a 10 at 2.

What did Billy Shakespeare say?

Drink increases the desire decreases the performance

something like that. Where’s ma memory pills, womin?

As a guy sitting next to me in a bar once said: “Everytime that bartender brings me a drink, she gpes and puts on some more makeup.”

alcohol never affected my perception of beauty. however, my standards may have been altered a time or two.

Lewreader, it’s in Macbeth, II:iii.

The Porter says that drink is a great provoker of three things: Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes and unprovokes. It provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance. Therefore much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery. It makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him and disheartens him; makes him ‘stand to’ and ‘not stand to’; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep and, giving him the lie, leaves him.

Or, from less secular scripture, there’s Mark 14:38 - “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

Shall I compare thee to a Happy Hour? For thou art cheaper, and more dimly lit. Thy smell of cigarettes is twice as sour, And ‘pon thy seat a brace of men might sit. The neon signs which shine above the bar Are pale ‘gainst thy burst-capillaried nose, And thy complexion? Pickles in a jar I glimpse upon thy cheek, and not the rose. Thy voice the broken jukebox, thy hair the rag That wipes the spilléd beer from off the floor And yet I hear that ev’ry tongue doth wag Thou swing’st as freely as the Men’s Room door. So, as I am myself no golden youth, ”Bartender, two martinis - sans vermouth.”

Bravo, fritzoid; you are, to my knowledge, the first person ever to post a sonnet here.

Sherlock, I might be the first AND the second. I originally wrote this for a “Duplex” strip a couple of months ago…

Joe, I “repurposed” the verse from Mark. (I’m all about conserving resources.)

@fritzoid, congratulations. it’s a lovely sonnet, and sonnets are not that easy to write, considering all the rules.

The ninth line has an extraneous syllable, but W.S. himself was guilty of that on occasion.

You could substitute “barkeep” if you wanted to tolerate the faux Old West flavor.

In the last (14th) line? It wouldn’t scan.

“BAR-keep, TWO mar-TI-nis, SANS ver-MOUTH” is a syllable short (again, that wouldn’t be fatal, but I think it works better all around the way I have it).

No, the superfluity is in: “JUKE-box, thy HAIR”.

Oh, then I miscounted the lines (talk about working too late, or too early). Well, then, what about “juke” or “box”? A poetic shortening could be forgiven, and if memory serves the Bard did that often enough too.

Wow, stupid cartoon turns into lesson in English Lit. Gotta love it.

I’ve considered “juke” rather than “jukebox”, but it sounds clunky. Just using “box” would be confusing, I think. I’ve also considered dropping the second “thy” in the line: “Thy voice, the broken jukebox; hair, the rag…” but again the improved scansion comes at the cost of overall euphony. Ultimately, I think the extra syllable (there’s a technical term for that, I believe, but I’ve forgotten it) is the least of all available ills.