A Sestina.

My friend Emma's friend Hannah
said I should write a sestina, however
I didn't know what one was, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. It
turns out that a sestina has six stanzas, each with six lines,
followed by a seventh stanza with three lines at the end.
Easy enough, Yes?

Ah but it's not that simple, see? Yes,
that would be too easy so there's a quirk an' a
twist to complicate things and send
you on an adventure, because however
long you make your lines,
the sestina has an odd rule to it.

The six stanzas have to end with the same words, but it
has to be in a different order each time. Yes,
some crafty bugger in the twelfth century declined
other forms of poetry an' came up with his own. Hannah
told me about this form in the Jericho Tavern one night, however
coz I was a bit drunk an' it was a bit loud, by the end

of the day I'd forgotten the details. I was gonna pretend
I remembered them and write something completely wrong, but it
dawned on me I should probably try and do it right. However
I'm not really confident in my abilities as a poet. Yes,
poetry is not really my forte. Hannah
said this probably isn't true. She's probably being nice an' trying to get me to write lines

an' lines
of the stuff to find my voice or style or whatever. Poets defened
their art to the end, an' a
poet will wish that more people would try it,
give it a chance, an yes
it would be nice if people were more open minded about poetry. However,

at the same time I wonder, however,
whether they really would like being aligned
with every tom, dick an' harry who put pen to paper. Yes,
a cultural revolution it may be, but in the end
the fact that more people don't write or like poetry makes it
something more intellectual and exclusive Hannah,

and I think, at least some, poets like that Hannah. However,
it may be I'm wrong in this perception, and these final lines
are wide of the mark. In the end, who am I really to say, yes?