It was about a year and a half ago that I first stumbled onto one of my favorite blogs during a fit of insomnolent meandering. I happened to arrive just after the flurry of activity in the comments for a post about double dactyls had died down. Despite my tardiness, I contributed a few examples in the comments for some subsequent posts, as the double dactyl is one of poesy’s most sublimely ridiculous forms. (I have yet to find a description of the form online that is both complete and correct, but this one comes close.)
Some of you may remember the blogathon I did two summers ago. During the blogathon, I posted, over a period of 24 hours, 49 haiku about gay dating, in return for readers’ pledges to support a theater company some friends and I were starting. Since the blogathon seems to be hibernating, at least for the moment, I decided to do it again on my own. But this time, instead of posting haiku, I would write and post 49 double dactyls about famous and/or influential gay people from the past and present.
This became a nightmare more quickly than you can imagine. First of all, finding 49 gay people with double-dactylic names (or names that could somehow be made into double dactyls) proved to be well nigh impossible, as there are only so many historically interesting Christophers. Second, and worse, where the haiku practically wrote themselves, a good double dactyl can take (for me at least) days of continual work. I got two done and was halfway through a third before I realized that if I ever wanted to accomplish anything else in my life I had to abandon this project.
And so, in lieu of 49 double dactyls, here’s one:
Hickory Dickory
David’s beau Jonathan
Told his dad Saul, “Dave’s got
Vigor and vim;
Further, in matters of
Priapicality,
Trust me–Goliath’s got
Nothing on him.”
If this inspires one of you to give a dollar to a gay person with an unfortunate haircut, then I’ll consider my time to have been well spent.
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