Here’s a poem called a duplex, a sonnet variation developed by the poet Jericho Brown. It’s 14 lines long–and it follows a pattern of partial repetition in the first line of each stanza of the second line of the preceding stanza. Except that the first line and the last line must be the same. A true but mundane story about buying a shed and converting a garage. Home improvement poetry.
Buying A Shed
Today I tried to buy our home a shed
to store the shit that we’ll take out
of the garage, the shit we’ll take outside
while we convert the garage into a home.
We want our garage to be like a home
and a shed to do what garages do
save house the cars, like garages do
but not ours. Ours is just storage, you know.
Tools, mowers, camping stuff–storage, you know.
I’ll work out there, when the project is done
unless someone else lives there when it’s done;
it’s not what I want, but what I might get
if my work is not lucrative. It’s what I might get.
Today I tried to buy our home a shed.
michael jarmer 