1950s Titusville and Mims
From giant, bulging cylinders the fans
Sprayed out the fog to kill mosquitoes. How
They acted I don’t know. Cancelled their banns?
Abandoned buggy fucking? Stuttered, “Ow!”?
I wonder if the city fathers were
Opposed to free flight sex on buzzing wings.
Were men opposed to points invading fur?
Most wanted holes to take their veiny stings
And white-ish slimy innoculation.
Well, yes, of course they still believed that black
And white shouldn’t mix—miscegenation
Was forbidden, not aphrodisiac.
. . Strong strictures hobbled manly white breeder.
. . . . The county bombed its civil rights leader.
Note: Here the meter is off on lines 9 & 11 and 13 &14.
The standard way to avoid this is to treat the final unstressed syllable of a so-called “feminine” rhyme as the extra, uncounted, eleventh syllable of the line, so that the final stressed syllable which really carries the rhyme is in the rhythmically-expected tenth-syllable spot. Perhaps that is why you have said before that you don’t like feminine rhymes, because the way you are using it here, at least, does throw off the dominant and expected stress/meter pattern. That’s why poets found the above solution, which works much better. (You can still avoid them if you want, of course; but if a poet has ten syllables in a line with a “feminine” rhyme at the end, it is actually their line which scans and not yours in this case “improperly” with only ten. If one can wrap one’s head around that little paradox (!) Not a big deal, just a detail, but usually your are quite punctilious about metrical and rhyme matters etc.
Tom, I believe I’ve corrected the faulty syllabifications. Thank you for pointing them out. I’m in debt to you.