I was hosting a party, drinking a beer out of a bottle and mingling aimlessly, making sure that everyone was having a good time. As I was wandering down a hallway I saw my sister's friend Suzy. 

We said hello, and I smiled and asked her, "What's new?" -- not really wanting or expecting an answer.

She shrugged, and then said "Oh!" as she suddenly thought of something relevant. "I just had my navel pierced."

"Oh, that's nice," I said, not really thinking so, and then -- feigning interest -- said, "Can I see it?" (I had no real interest in navel rings. I had seen plenty of them before, and I was sure that this one would be as mundane as any other small piece of jewelry; but I was determined to be polite.)

"Sure." And she lifted her shirt up as I stooped down to see it.

I was suddenly paralyzed by two feelings. First, the ring/navel combination was extremely sexy. It was attractive to the point of striking me dumb, and it probably caused me to stare a bit too long. Second, I was inwardly astounded at my reaction. Navel rings had never before been attractive to me. 

I stayed there, crouched, looking at her ring freshly skewering her blood-encrusted navel for several seconds (probably with my mouth hanging open) until Suzy finally broke my stupor by saying: "So, what do you think?"

I stood, suddenly embarrassed and confused. I said, "I think -- I need another beer." And I quickly retreated to the kitchen.

After that incident I decided to write a poem about it. After all, the moment that I looked at the navel ring marked a change in my esthetic values (and maybe even my sexual values), and reminded me how such small things can have great impact on the ways I view the world. I also felt that I should give Suzy a decent answer to her question.

I wrote a lot of mud, and as I pulled lines out and shuffled them around, playing with the sounds and images, I developed a sketch of the poem. Here are some primordial lines:
 

From this beginning sketch I pulled out an idea for a form which I would try to carry for all parts of the poem. Each part would consist of two stanzas, and each stanza would separate the last line out as a single line. The stanzas are described as follows.

Stanza 1-Four lines, loosely metered, generally three or four stresses for lines 1, 2, and 4; and five or six stresses for line 3. Lines 2 and 4 rhyme. This example shows stresses in italics --
 

Stanza 2-seven lines (a septet); lines one through six are very short (three or four syllables). Line one, in order to slow down the tempo, has syllables that rhyme with corresponding syllables in line two, as well as alliteration or consonance to strengthen the beat. Line three has a word ("raised" in this case) repeated in line three of all other septets in the poem. Lines five and six have end consonance with each other and with every other fifth and sixth line in all septets. Line seven is separated and contains four stresses. Again, stresses are italicized.
 

When I finished the poem, there were flaws, but I thought that since the form was my own, I could be real loose with it, and no one would really question it. Initially I was right; the poem was a big hit, and as far as I know Suzy still has it hanging up in her house. Here it is, the way it stayed for almost three years: 
 

Then one of my friends (who doesn't read poetry very much) read The Ring again, and afterwards told me that she "stumbled" in parts of it. Particularly in the last stanza, she was ready for one rhythm that was set up in previous stanzas, but hit a different one. After three years I had been caught, and I had to admit she was right. So I reviewed the poem, and fixed the last stanza by trimming off syllables from the lines.

I reworked the "grant us rodin's naked kissing wish" line as well. That line always bothered me. The Kiss is a famous sculpture by Rodin, and I wanted to use images of famous literature or art pieces in that part of the poem, to contrast with M. C. Escher's lithograph, The Fish. But "wish" was just thrown in -- badly thrown in -- to rhyme with "fish"; and the meter seemed to depart so much from the first stanza in the poem that it damaged the rest of its own stanza.

I went to the first and last quatrains and scanned the meter more carefully. The last quatrain is obviously a strong iambic tetrameter, but the first stanza is a mishmash. It begins in trochees, switches in the second and third lines to mostly amphibrachs (three syllables per foot, the second of which is stressed), then flows back into trochees in the fourth line.
 

Well, that's one way to scan it; when it comes to meter, opinions may vary.

Actually, line 4, when put together and scanned with the fourth lines from the other quatrains, is decidedly iambic tetrameter (with one hypercatalectic ending):
 

So slipping into iambics in the last quatrain from the first quatrain's chaos wasn't too unnatural. This was my puzzle: I needed to come up with a line that helped the middle quatrain bridge the first and last quatrains' meters. Since the middle quatrain (ignoring the mutant second line) was iambic, I needed amphibrachic meter for the second line, and I needed a well known piece of art that I could rhyme with "fish". Finally, after trying several combinations of "wish" and "dish"(there wasn't much else in the "ish" catagory), I gave up and went to my muse (who happened to be in the guise of Gina) for assistance. 

"I need a famous piece of art that depicts a feast or meal," I said, without explaining why. 

"How about The Last Supper," she replied. I promptly slapped my forehead, and let out Homer's famous line: "Doh!" (Hah! you thought I meant the other Homer, didn't you?)

Immediately after she spoke, the bad line was mentally converted to a good one --"or grant us davinci's last dish". It worked well with the surrounding lines, and was amphibrachic. I'm now very happy with the reworked poem, and I'm glad I listened to my critic.