Some notes on a failed ghazal

So the other night I was pondering the current assignment, writing forms of poetry. Wasn't really feeling the idea of a sonnet, so I asked one of my poetically inclined friends and she suggested a ghazal. I hadn't heard of it before and was pretty intrigued. The ghazal, I found out, is a form from Arabic/Persian/Urdu where the first couplet rhymes, and then every subsequent stanza's second line uses part of the B line for a refrain. They also need a strict rhyme and rhythm pattern. Here's a bit of a ghazal by Agha Shahid Ali as an example:

Okay, I was going to post some of it, but Blogger's not letting me paste it because we live in a police state. Instead I'll direct you to the Wikipedia page where you can read some of it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ghazal

So you've familiarized yourself now, presumably. Connections to Sufism, close relation to music, fairly neat form all things considered. I wanted a topic I had a lot to say about for trying a new form, so I decided to write about Smug TV Chef Bobby Flay. I think Bobby Flay was the guy who danced on his cutting board on Iron Chef and everybody was all mortified by his disregard for Kitchen Stadium, and even if he didn't do that it totally seems like something he'd do. On Bobby Flay's Throwdown, he goes to little neighborhood restaurants and makes spicier chowder or lasagna or whatever than somebody and gets judges to declare his dish better than these people's trademark dishes in front of a crowd and he manages to be smug about that, too. Food Network under Flavian hegemony is going to hell in a grilled-tomatillo handbasket.

I don't really like his shows.

So I embarked upon a ghazal beginning,

Will TV ever see a day
Without the grating Bobby Flay?

8 syllables, then 5 syllables, but actually I'd already broken a rule of the traditional ghazal - no enjambment across the lines. I continued, though:

Oh look! I use chipotles! Wow!
The "innovating" Bobby Flay.

I came up with a few more refrains - berating Bobby Flay, exasperating Bobby Flay - but I was feeling a lot less vitriolic after getting started and decided to abandon my slanderous ghazal. I think I just needed a change of topic - for the structure/rule assignment, I wrote some haiku with extra restrictions, which was interesting. Has anybody else had difficulties with trying new forms?