DISCLAIMER: This is an unauthorized work of fiction using characters that are (c) & TM by Marvel Comics Group. No profit is being made on this poem, so I'll invoke The Marvel Readers' Bill of Rights (for the full text see "Stan's Soapbox" in some of the May 1998 comics, e.g. GENERATION X #38):
"8. The right to practice scripting and drawing our Marvel characters for your own pleasure and amusement."
The story is (c) Tilman Stieve (Menshevik@aol.com). You can download this and copy it for your entertainment, but don't sell it for profit, or Marvel will set their lawyers on you. Please do not archive this on your website without informing me first.
To My Dark-Haired Lady belongs to my series, the Tales of the Twilight Menshevik, where it fits both into the main timeline (and thus to its continuation into the future, the Days of Future Twilight) and that of Twilight Yet to Come as a poem written by Hank McCoy for his wife, Trish Tilby.
You can find the Tales archived on "Fonts of Wisdom," "Down-Home Charm," "MissyRedX: The Average Website" and "Stacy's Fan-Fiction Page."

To My Dark-Haired Lady
by Tilman Stieve
a.k.a. the Menshevik

My dark-haired lady, you possess great beauty,
Your smile makes you a cutie;
Though you deny it you're a lovely vision,
I'll shout out you're the belle of television
While risking the derision
You'll use to hide to pride from this blue mutie.

You're headstrong, freely speak you mind, my beauty,
Though sometimes you sound snooty,
For even when you risked a harsh collision
You did not try to shirk a tough decision
By asking for a revision,
No, you do what you deem your moral duty.

With looks and bearing first my heart you stole,
That will remain yours, not because you're pretty
And we both like the city --
I love you mind and body as a whole.

I marvel and my heart leaps like a foal
Because you love me not because I'm pretty
Robust or somewhat witty --
You reached below that surface to my soul.

Notes: I found this form, the sonetto doppio (double sonnet), in a German dictionary of literary terms. As I haven't yet seen an actual example, it may not be entirely correct. The main difficulty I found was that I had to work with just four rhymes for twenty lines without too many repetitions. I now well understand why German and English sonnet forms generally tend to use more rhymes than the classic Petrarcan one (abba abba cdc cdc or abba abba cdc dcd).
Henry P. McCoy is nothing if not a mutant who likes to talk (and not just to a man who likes to talk), so he needed a longer form than an ordinary 14-line sonnet. And of course he could not make do with just one poem to his lady love, so there's another, much longer one, in which he describes her physical beauty in great, and a times intimate detail, Trish -- A Rapture...

Beast (Henry McCoy) and Trish Tilby are (c) and TM Marvel Comics.

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