The Unfair Sex

The Unfair Sex

Original Text
John Robert Colombo, Earlier Lives: Old Poems and New Effects (Colombo and Co., 1996); and now in All the Poems of John Robert Colombo (Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2005): II: 432.
1Some girls are like French verbs,
2the irregular kind. Avoir. Etre.
3They have strong wills of their own.
4They prefer the singular to the plural,
5The intransitive to the transitive.
6They decline most unexpectedly.

Notes

2] Irregular verbs do not use the usual inflections to mark gender, number, tense, etc., but rather different word-forms entirely (e.g., "am," "is," "are"). French has three key irregular verbs, the pair given here and faire, to make. Avoir: to have. Etre: to be. Back to Line
4] singular: the unusual, the quirky; and the grammatical sense. Back to Line
5] Intransitive verbs do not communicate their force to an object (e.g., the English verb sleep ... the intransitive "She never slept with him" but never the transitive "She never slept him"). Back to Line
6] decline: conjugate, exhibit grammatical inflections; punning on "lie down." Back to Line
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
2010
Form
unrhyming couplets
Special Copyright

"The Unfair Sex" from <i>All the Poems of John Robert Colombo</i>, &copy; 2005 by John Robert Colombo. Reprinted by permission of the author.