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If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
--from William Shakespeare's sonnet 130


Will Shakespeare's Mistress

He has the gall to complain of my breath?
Will? Who will groan for hours on the jakes?
He reeks like London, and is thin as Death
without his robe. "Nay, hardy as snowflakes!"
he jests. Yet moonlight is as pale as Will,
up all night writing. Oh and that high dome
of a head, like an onion’s! And still, still…
he fences with me, asking “Am I handsome?”
Nay, but bawdy: his cock, he jokes, “a poem
eager to please, like a Petrarchan sonnet!”
It does. Our sex “sea storms, which end in foam
and sighs, and finds us waking sopping wet”.
Yet we fence back and forth. ‘Tis love or lust?
How can one know? But oh his blade’s thrust!

Clever - in form & content



Michael (MV)

Thank you, Michael

Will himself wrote many cross gendered poems. You have excelled him.

That's very generous. Thank you