I saw them frozen on the trail: Villanelle

The ice has held us far too long.
We are as mute as it is thick:
We are too cold, too cold for song.

Observer those limbs which once were strong!
Now tattered muscle on bent sticks
The ice has held us far too long.

There are no words, no wrights or wrongs
To save us from the blizzard's pricks;
We are too cold, too cold for song.

We have no breath with which to long
Or moan through some strange wind-magic.
The ice has held us far too long.

We once had mouths--those now are gone
To frost of our own artifice.
We are too cold, too cold for song.

If you see us--(think! frozen in throngs
Of ignorance) remember this,
The ice that holds us for too long.
We are too cold, too cold for song.


(HOLY CRAP.)

I just wrote a form a day, (nearly) every day.

More thinking about that later.

Tybarn

I called
and felt
the wind
(your breath)
upon my neck behind the only
veil of consciousness and loving grace

This one is about ghosts: Tritina

Who can we call?
(Ghostbusters! but I can't see us
hanging by the telephone at home

hoping that they'll home
in on a signal, some misplaced call
for help none of us

truly believe in.) None of us
have hearth or home
in mind or soul. Call

us foolish--we hear the phantoms call us home.

Triolet: Beware the Whip

Beware the whip.
Beware the yoke.
(the words came easy to the fist)
Beware the whip--
beware the death of Feeling's grip
(she smiled slightly as she wrote).
Beware the whip.
Beware the yoke.

Terza Rima

Terza Rima is one of my favourite so far.

It was not death, nor any age
of reckoning within the green;
I felt no silence stir my page

it was a shadow to be seen
a kind of flutter in the chest
a kind of sign from rook to queen

who knows life stirs, but honour bests
the rigid tiling of the board--
so holds life squirming to his breast.

Who held his days as in a hoard,
who felt his time like summer tide
like birds who fell when others soared

Such greatness I cannot abide!
O let me stay my course awhile
and smile and hear the others cry

and hear the others cry, and smile

Tetractys

Interesting this is.

Yoda I am not.

I
don't feel
any pain
at all at all
(he swore, staggering drunk into the night)

I Am So Glad This One Is Short: Tanka

My house
will be
decorated
with the
wild flowers
of your mind.

I am, of course, lying: Sonnet!

Whatever words may come, will come, and stay--
I cannot amputate from me my very limbs
so terribly or gangrenous might they
display themselves to Reason's haughty hymns.
My lines may stretch and grow so like a skin
to let my soul come forth on inky song--
there are no words abandoned, words that sin
so thoroughly as to be left alone.
If I had never writ not made a sound
I would accept my own mind's mortal coil:
But since I sing with birds from holy ground
I cannot die still having burnt my toil.
No absolute shall from from my old pen. But note:
I am content. I thought. I sang. I wrote.

Sestina, foo'

I am confused as how to actually produce this form--I've gotten a bunch of schemes from a bunch of sources--so this may not actually be one. But it has a form, it does.

In other news--POSSIBLY LONGEST POEM I HAVE EVER WRITTEN.

Written After A Kidnapping In The Woods On A Cold Evening

They come for me when winter's hounds are near
and darkness upon darkness kills the day,
beneath that silent blanket of our fears,
beneath the weary sparrow's southern way.
They come for me with torches burning bright
against the stifling darkness of the night.

I do not hear them come upon me til
I feel the horses' breathing taste my neck
and send the burrowed knife of fear render me still
as they surround me like mist--"Demons, detect
(I say with much more bravery than I feel)
that I--" They look, and fire melts the steel.

"Be quiet, youngling--yours is not the place
to speak upon we armies of the night.
We are the ones who see the Fiend's very face
so filled with spurnèd virtue turned to spite:
Can you produce the majesty of Hell?"
I hear my death close itself on its knells.

And I am tak'n and stolen then away
upon those beasts as solid as the wind
that comes up from the sea, wind tinged with waves
and salt and blood. I boldly try to spin
against my bonds to see the starts that gave
me life, that gave me death that eve
(and this for no true reason I'd believe!).

I cannot help but cry aloud-- "Oh God,
"How came I to this fate? Through some cruel jest
of Time or Place or Fancy? Did I nod
away my vigilance, my earnèd faith--"
I speak no more, yet silence does not ring;
I cease my words, and so begin to sing.

I cannot say where come this heav'nly song
Or why the riders suddenly stop their race;
I sing with mortal voice divine along
to cries of rage as I am loosed by grace.
"He has the Song! Begone, my brothers, fly!"
And I am left alone--the dark and I.

And so, if left alone on darker nights,
And fear no winter that does come with spring,
Let none come take you--free your soul and sing.

Rondelet

i am so tired
that i cannot go back to sleep
i am so tired
i do not have the strength required
to think of rhymes or poems deep--
to writer my forlorn masterpiece
I am so tired.

(Did Eliot write this badly when he was young?)

Rondeau

I remember it well:
The sound of the bells
The holier shades
Through forest and glades
That drowned our mourning knells;

Those infantile hells
Of masking our swells
Of sadness or rage--
I remember them well.

Yet for all I can tell
There was always the spell
Of meandering made
Meditation by shade
Or the pine-needle smell.
I remember it well.

Limerick

I am disgusted with myself.

I used to love limericks for what you
could pull out of them if they got you.
Then I found acrostics
and then went agnostic
'bout that poetry stuff that they taught you.

Dear God.
I
hate
limericks.

Pleiades

Tantramar.

There's no freezing here, no,
the seasons won't allow it because of
this -- can't you hear it?
This shift of sight from day to night
the sound of queen against knight
two minds two hands two heads two hearts
tick-tocking hello.

Nonet

I like the degeneration implied in a nonet(in case you can't figure it out--nine, eight, seven, etc. syllables down to one).  Form thus dictates my function? Entropy of the poetic? Who knows.

we who have never forgotten the
crack of the neighbour's whip then the
rage of the earth in the night
from which we rose and thrived
we are beggars still
free but only
beggars, still
beggars
still

Ode

I know nothing at all

when I walk among your wispy trees,
tripping on headstones and
catching myself on
monuments to the long dead.

you are your own garden of
dates and names
knowledge unfthomable
buried and gnawed at until
it crumbled into the earth
fell into the grass
grew into the mist
that whispers at my feet--

you are still with the contentment
of life lived and
(not honoured but)acknowledged
with plastic and  tears and
tulips from the gate.

you do not ask
for proof or written confession.

you remain
like a cradle to my weeping child.
that is all I ask

and all I receive.

Senryu

Me, slipping? Never.

Silence is the
only real thing, man--
do you know what I'm saying?

Parallelismus Membrorum

I swear I wrote this last night. Also, not a lillibonnelle because that form is stupid, too, and not really what I would call legitimate. This one's been here for about three thousand years, so take that, new forms!

Everything is broken
and everything is whole.
The empty
has been filled.
You are too much
and too little's grandchild.
Every sword
is your shield now,
every creed
a denial of faith.
Be not afraid
but let fear transport you
through the open doors
of love.

Lento

I kind of like this one--it was created very recently, but the interior rhyme scheme is tricky to hold but fun to pull along. An interesting reversal.

Tomorrow: Lilibonelle!


I have not met a tree that walks
desired to find its roots again--
"Supply my aching limbs with rest?
"To die! rather than stagnant pain!

"Though I must walk, yet I will stride
thro' forest to 'scape these thoughts of her."
So too do I refuse to rest:
O nature of the wanderer!

Kyrielle

Tomorrow: Lento!

If trees could speak as well as you
You would be silenced by that view
Of memory nailed against their grain--
A bark that sings against our pain.

You'd write no fields of poppies red
Or let grass cradle soldiers' heads.
(These leaves drank blood, and held no stain!
O shall the earth sing forth our pain?)

I have not wandered restless nights
In forest or in city light
Among the bodies of the slain
To hear the earth sing forth its pain--

But rather found unearnèd peace
Beneath the streetlamps and the leaves
And felt the wars washed by the rain.
Let not the earth sing forth our pain!

Reasons Why I Avoid Public Showers When I Can, #23

Three words:

Naked old men.


Uhhhhgggghh.

Haiku

Bit of a cheap one. Tomorrow: Kyrielle!

leaves are underground
to let the roots claw through the earth
and taste the winter air

Epistle

the nine things he left

1.
all wives are immigrants:
they run into women,
see the Old Country
and run home

2.
there is no second cry
for help;
there never is,
he finds
and sits back down

3.
strange to see old men in my friends' faces;
stranger still
not to see them
in mine

4.
Read your letters last night
and burned the last one
so I wouldn't know
the end.

5.
April is no time for poetry
because it makes you forget age
and sights of better days.
No man is old then.

6.
My body is real
because it sees itself
in the glistening ink
that runs behind
thought

7.
there is nothing for us here
there are no shadows here

8.
You say it has already left
it's passed us
like the growth of a tree
or a grandchild

9.
I beg to differ

Dorsimbra

American for fecking stupid.

"DORSIMBRA:  The Dorsimbra, a poetry form created by Eve Braden, Frieda Dorris and Robert Simonton, is a set form of three stanzas of four lines each.  Since the Dorsimbra requires three different sorts of form writing, enjambment can help to achieve fluidity between stanzas, while internal rhymes and near-rhymes can help tie the stanzas together."


In other words, a stolen hodgepodge.


the truth is in a true poetic form
not some half-baked amalgam from which come
some messy hodgepodge verses, all that mourn
the death of all that history has run.

(but hey! if verse
is all you call it, I suppose
we're free to form
deformities.)

this challenge fails to teach me more than what
I have been taught before--form's form, and that
brings forth no knowledge of the earth (unless
the truth is in a true poetic form.)

Dodoitsu

After one night of Charlestons
and slides, I have concluded
thus: It's in the twenties that
I should have been born.

Diamontes are Stupid

Some forms just suck.  I kind of didn't like writing this one!
Tomorrow: Dodoitsu.

sense
physical extrapolation
touching--feeling--smelling
reality, surrounding, flux, assumption
streaming--calculating--sensing
internal flux
thought

Clerihew

I do not like clerihews, but they're kind of fun to write. Maybe I should write more.

Tomorrow: Diamonte!

I moan the Curies
For their few progeny.
A sexual insensitivity
Brought by radioactivity?

Cinq-cinquaine

Today, a cinq-cinquaine; tomorrow, a clerihew.

A wind
As strong as love:
It's terrifying here--
So loud that you can feel
it fall.

I feel
as though I should
go in, or somehow try
to fix what falls from this old porch,
to pull

the trees
and branches down
with string from kites that hang
on our old walls like diagrams
of bone

or cast
a hunter's net
over my own backyard.
(to pull in leaves and rakes and old
rose-buds?

you're mad!
no creature seeks
a prey so large, so dense
it seems too light for truth itself.
Go in.)

Ballad

Today, a ballad; tomorrow, a cinq-cinquaine.

Oh let us walk, then, you and I,
In smiles despite the rain
That comes like ancient floods to eyes
Unburdened but untrained.

And you will dance the maypoles all
And kick the leaves away
And wash the street like some strange Fall
From one primordial day--

"The world is ending! That I know
as much as I can tell
Can we not let our gardens grow
But mourn our fates as well?"

And I will shudder, wait, and sigh
As you come back to me
With lightness from the stormclouds' height
A trail behind your feet.

So let us walk, then, you and I,
If smiles do bring the rain.
(If worlds must pay our sins with lies
Give me my sin again!)

I am not sure about it. Perhaps it's letting the form carry you rather than having your poem carry the form... To be found.

Abecedarian

So! This is how it's going to work until Nov. 30th.

Everyday, a new poetic form. I have been told by certain people that freeform is noform, which led me to form negative habits about structure and rhyme. So, take that! One poem a day, a different kind every day.

Today, abecedarian. Tomorrow, ballad.

aimless under
broken streetlights we let
causal notions of the sidewalk
draw us home.
enough of stepping, we think,
forever losing balance to move forward.
god, if only life were escalators!
hope is last century but I swear
I would stay near the railing and
just look at the advertisements on the sides,
knowing that at
least I'm
moving.
nothing would give me more pleasure than
opening it all up, cracking through asphalt and gravel,
pulp of the city glistening and exposed, city
qua city in our minds being (and
rightly so ) electricity under wires, breath and
sweat and
tears of the living and the dead
under all the pressure of buildings of
video conference and nothing without us
walking on it and pushing forward like
Xeno's paradox disproven.
yes--it's better to walk,
zenith passed or approaching.