I wrote and posted this on a forum thread of uniformly awful original poetry, partly because I wanted to make fun of the people posting their terrible works, but mostly because I wanted to make fun of them. As you can tell, it’s a bloody masterpiece.
This are a poem,
A poem I has writ.
I done gone and wrote it,
And this here is it.
A poem gotta rhyme,
And need to have rhythm.
I run outta time.
A good word is ‘kitten’.
I coulda been worser;
You should be quite thank
-ful that I didn’t
Write verse that be blank.
It’s easy and simple
And not very hard
To keep hittin’ Enter
after
each
word.
But just cuz you space it
With random line breaks
Don’t make it mean nothin’.
That’s common mistakes.
I guess what I’s sayin’
In words fast and slow-etry
You can use forms poetic,
But it don’t make it poetry.
There are seven of us, and we are Very Fierce.
Match your wits to our teeth, if you dare.
-From Elegy v2 for RTS Zheng
I’ve spent years on this fellow, seven at least, and yet the demons still grab me and tell me, “You don’t know what you’re writing about. You can’t imagine life from any other eyes than yours.” And it’s true, it’s true. They say if you don’t understand others, it’s because you don’t understand yourself. This presents a problem. Operation: Find Self is currently underway.
I am sick in the mornings;
A time of waking. Timid morning sounds,
The birds in the lower branches; the shadowy violence
Of squirrels–they bark down the young trees.
They scatter at once when silence breaks sound,
And the branches are wraiths to the rising light,
Waving shadows on the rooms already dim.
When what is in me is reduced to lighting,
I can go only backwards, past dawn—
To where grey shapes are moving on a screen,
Or—I slept imageless last night.
Glistened;
The light on the ice on the water.
We spoke too loud.
Cars muffling other sounds, to irritate:
The heaviness of a false silence.
Sometimes above (on) waterways, ways which cross
And then divide—to things indivisible. I
weigh the universe in these pieces.
Light shattered. Dark, solid river–solemn.
A pale, dreamt shape, my shapeless hands,
Cutting the air. Through distant air.
A low swooping bird, skimming the water.
Together, we don’t attract or repel.
What is weakest, what sinks to matter, to flesh
(but deeper than skin) bone close.
And the closeness of bone leaves me lost.
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