This is a comment someone appended to a photo of two men apparently having sex in a very fancy room, but it’s also kind of an amazing two-line poem? “His Wife has filled his house with chintz” is a really elegant and beautiful counterbalancing of h, f, and s sounds, and “chintz” is a perfect word choice here—sonically pleasing and good at evoking nouveau riche tackiness. And then “to keep it real I fuck him on the floor” collapses that whole mood with short percussive sounds—but it’s still a perfect iambic pentameter line, robust and a lovely obscene contrast with the chintz in the first line. Well done, tumblr user jjbang8
I hate that my aesthetic sense agrees with this but everything you just said was correct
I went back to dig up this post because I was thinking about poetry.
This is one of those non-poem things that are among my favorite poems.
As the OP stated, the use of alliterative consonants is aesthetically just great, especially the placement of the strongest use at the end: “fuck him on the floor.” The use of “chintz” is indeed great word choice.
Because I’m insane, decided to scan the poem:
Not only is the second sentence, indeed, perfect iambic pentameter, the entire poem is perfectly metered, though the first sentence has four iambs rather than five.
There are further things I love about this poem, though: I like the casual connotations of “keep it real” juxtaposed with “chintz.” It causes me to interpret the “chintz” more strongly as meaning something fake, a facade. There is also of course the coarseness of “fuck,” which is a contrast with “chintz” but a different kind of contrast, gutsy and carnal where “chintz” is flimsy and inanimate.
And then there is the storytelling: there is SO MUCH storytelling in just these two lines. To break it down: The speaker is having sex with a married man, in the house he shares with his wife, which is “filled with chintz”—something that here connotes fakeness, in contrast with “keep it real.”
The illicit encounter in the poem takes place within a house filled with facade, the flimsy construction of the wife’s marriage and domestic sphere, but the encounter itself is a taste of something “real.” That’s a story, and it’s just two lines.
This is EIGHTEEN SYLLABLES, y’all. The amount of meaning condensed into these eighteen syllables is stunning, and it is so elegantly done.
From a technical standpoint (and ive taken 300- and 400-level poetry classes so I can say this) this is damn near flawless as a poem.
Kept thinking about this ever since I saw it and had to do something
there's art now
Ah dang to go further; the floor is framed as a refuge. As if there is literally no other space in this house that hasn't been populated by his wife with flimsy inanimate fakery. There is no space for this man in this house save for the floor. There is no space for him on the sofa, oon the counter tops, and most notably, no space for him in the marital bed.
I’d also like to point out the use of the word “has.” The wife has filled the house with chintz. She isn’t filling the house with chintz. She doesn’t fill the house with chintz. She has filled the house with chintz. Use of the past-tense makes the wife a subtly removed element in the story, someone whose presence we see in the environment, but who is blissfully distant during the actors throes of passion. There is an element of physical as well as emotional separation from the wife that is catalyzed by being fucked on the floor. Use of the past tense is an end to the wife presence in the actors life, a carnal catharsis amid cold fragility and emotional distance.
