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.