Sharing our own poetry

[Dissolved]

Feel free to provide any type of criticism you like.

Here’s some poetry I posted off the cuff in chat:

Locks now useless, leaking with stress
you swear in rage, screaming at every stage.
Puzzles that are just pathetic collections of but-thou-must
Locks demanding impossible keys, leaving you to lurch in the breeze.

Also here’s

topics: surreal nonsense, mention of injury

Languid morning slips down the long throat of evening luxury.
Coming undone, bit by unfortunate bit—forwards to deep damnation
As a dream floats freely to mind—down she looks; the scar's on her thigh,
She sigh s—scene floats out, a signless phantasm bearing no story.

Off topic discussion that's gotten longer than the entire rest of the post

PS: Is there anyway to get Discourse not to word-wrap stuff without code blocks? Using<pre>tags are the best solution I’ve found since that doesn’t ruin

italic or bold

text styles, but is there anything better? Apparently this doesn’t allow horizontal scrolling, which sort of defeats the point. sigh Back to code blocks with horrible formatting workarounds for me.

ETA: Actually using <pre><code> works to get scrollable boxes with italic/bold formatting

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah 

Hurrah.

[Dissolved]

Some untitled scraps of poetry I have in stock (yes, the ‘sweat’ in the first line of the first one is intentional)

CW: murder

Sweat sweet sweet wine
Runs down her chin.
She pulls the napkin to her lips
And dabs a spot
Of red. She damns it. Her eyes
Linger-lollygag scarlet tones
White cotton stare. She puts it down.
Teeth-salt; grit grit grit.

Concierge run run run.
Breath is out of stock,
Face is out of sorts.
He smiles, sweats
Roman pleasantries.
A knife. Her ribs. Well-driven.
A mouth forms an o.
Then silence.

Uniform uniform. Take off kit,
Put in locker, go home.
Letter from the widower.
Nice new traveler's cheques inside.
All in a day's work.

CW: futuristic war

Sky-scars cross the
Blue sun-blood as
Metal-oxen burn and
Scream with push-flame.

Vagrant-eyes pass across the metal-flesh
Of the detonator-depositors roaming near the people-herds
As knife-wolves wander near the goat-heaps.
People-dust to grave-dust, joy-ash to grief-ash.
Nothing creative here, here creative—

Honestly, I generally like to write poetry that tells strange and unsettling narratives.

[Dissolved]

@pieartsy

I wrote a sestina and formatted it into a brochure a few years back, if people wanna give thoughts or compliments

This was brilliant.

@Hidnook

Beep bop. I am a robot.

This poem was also good, even if it made me think of the trend of pointless Reddit bots.

[Dissolved]

A poem about a murder in a dieselpunk setting. Wrote it yesterday as a sort of exercise, I guess?

GEAR ROTATION — CW: death/murder

He walks down the catwalk
of the industrial furnace.
Whistling as the fumes
pass by his pretty head.
Not ten minutes later,
terribly he was found dead.

His organs distributed among
the order hoppers
like bills of materials
left to be mould-food.

His head was found ten feet away
among the airship's transmission
clogging up some hellishly small
gears—a Herculean effort for
the crunched cleaning crew.

The detectives came and went
sorting through nothing much
and finding even less.
Deadlines went and came
and files were reduced to mulch—
but all the company's motorcars
and all the company's muscle
couldn't sort out who killed
a nameless engineer.

Just another name whispered
as shifts change among the shafted.
Just another name plastered
on so many gears and so many minds
as gears and ‘gineers are distributed
like penny packets around the fleet.

[Dissolved]

Here’s one from the mouldering ideas pile

subjects/CWs: biblical symbology (Cain), gore, death, implied murder

After the butchery, blood
                        drops from the apron in crimson streams.
It flows                                   highest
       downwards, drying and clotting at the     point in to a blackish crust.
The butcher sops it with flowing 
                                w
                                a
                                t
                                e
                                r
                                 as the black clouds cover the merest sunbeams.
The c   c
     u u
      t
     s s 
        made in anger, made in lust
Are remembered.

Cain cleans his hands,
                      cleans
                             his boots.
And marches off
              to the land of Nod
                               to plant
                                      his roots.
The sun
      bathes the altar
                     where lies
                              the dismembered.

ETA:
Something of an exercise in improvisation; there’s some Aisle influence floating around in this soup of ideas.

topics/CWs: blood, death, trauma, horror

Your desire forgets fresh skin
As you wander the beaches
In search of sin.

What are your choices redolent no-doubt of envy and self hatred saying about you?
What do your lovers think of you lonely in their hearts as you are when they think of you at all?
What fresh hell are you smelling beneath the fresh leaves left unkept by the gardener as you 
Examine them for the choicest rot like the botrytised wines you had with Clare just before she
The Sauternes is the blood is the they’re both running down her face in streams 
In the restaurant in the bath
She's laughing | She’s bleeding out
You're frozen
In place, mise-en-scene get out the cutlery
You can't move
Would you like us to take the table on Tuesday, sir, or Thursday?
You look down 
Cooling wet cold as ice DEAD
You slink over to the toilet
What rough beast
Has come to the porcelain
To vomit?

You wake up. 
That‘s a long time ago,
Now. Even as it stays constantly
In the then.
Like an unwanted lodger.
MIND TO RENT
Available to all traumatic memories.
Don’t inquire
About the late unpleasantness.
Make sure to memorise trauma surgeons.
Inquire within.

You remember on some nights
What you saw afterwards
And never wanted to admit then
And less still now.

You saw her, outside your flat-window, beckoning. Our love need not die with my death, she said in that low
Voice which she had always hid from you in 'life'. Volumes sprung from your brain from the terror in that moment rife.
Soft peals of monstrous-pleadings wearing away at your ears. Peeling away your conscience with love‘s jeers.
Eyes smouldering with blood-desire seeing your being entire. Eruptions of what-could-be playing the mind‘s lyre
As Rome burns in passion’s cruel-flames to the tune of the heart’s games. Round the bend she drives you with her claims
Of immortality and eternal bonds of the heart’s-fancies. Importune the moment seems, but the truth is you were a coward which is why you weren’t fiancés
Vanishing after a thousand waste-wishes and useless pleas, she never visited you again. Valiantly, you try not to wonder, what if you’d accepted—what then?

You look across the night
Illuminating the beach
In cryptic darkness
Still seeing no sign of your sins 
And think of a dead future 
That never could have been.

[AdNauseam]

Here is a poem I made called “Between State”

Today, Today

It’s one of those days

Not bad, Not good

Not Content or Contempt

Or somewhere between

Today, Today

It’s better today

The mood is good

The rain is pouring

Not sad or mad

Rather somewhere between

Today, Today

It’s a gloomy day

Today, Today

The storm passes today

Today, Today

All of this between

[Dissolved]

Very nice, especially with how the refrain-like repetition of “Today, Today” cleanly separates the days in the reader’s mind.

[AdNauseam]

Thank you. The refrain was based on a song by Jack stauber. I forgot which. Anyway, I’m writing a new one. I’ll share it later

[Dissolved]

A mixture of prose poetry and verse titled “A Futile Eternity”

topics/CWs: fate, conflicts (non-military), 'barbarians' as fear

Cupid's arrow in eyes her gleam
From around her such liquid congregates 
In her evanescent dream—
What memories has she forgotten
What traces left on faces
Struck dumb and distraught 
As her private war waged itself
Over the public papers
And messages of a thousand souls
Spoiling like so much milk
Sporulated her invective
Growing like mould on mind-corridors 
But then what if she had not
What if she had left 
Justice—in her mind at least—to rot?

The accused sit beneath their bunkers, waiting for golf, tea, and newspapers. They sun themselves in the electric lamps, bending their skin (bronzed) to get more ‘light’. The storm weathered and sharpened, waned and screamed, news buried yet more denunciating in what does get though. Her hurting yells harm nobody because beneath this canopy of concrete there is nobody outside the circles of servants and hangers on. Nobody—nobody—nobody they say, chanting under their breath and over their beliefs, as they await, at the gates, the barbarians who shall talk of their destruction and other things foreign to their tongues. Men on horseback, horses on manback, devils rushing in where fools fear to tread as hellish cavalry. They await and beneath their opium of mantras, they have Coleridgian visions of being overrun, horsemen hanging them and turning their bunker into pleasure domes; they await a visitor from Porlock to cure them, to strike at their nerves and leave them pristine.

She thought she saw these horsemen, retreating forever into the future. She could never see what she wanted, only see what she would. They asked her to forsee their weddings and their wastes, their future trends and new tastes; she answered where she could and assaulted where she couldn’t, spitting threats of ruined fate and other theatres on the superstition-ruled rubes that came to her. Even the experts were rubes in her eyes, their expertise in the rules never excelling past what she wished. She knew the game she was stuck playing and she knew how how carefully how subtly to make people think she was playing something else, something roomy for more action, more liberty. She saw petty squabbles, she saw prisoners prisoned in their own fears, she saw a fury that never relented even as it broke against eternal concrete, she saw horsemen that always would be and never were; eternity in a static motion that never resolved.

[startsomewhere (Eli)]

here’s a favourite of mine

this body
we call ours.

these thoughts
we call our own.

this magic
we call life.

this place
we call home.

[startsomewhere (Eli)]

I really liked this! Good pacing and choice of words AdNauseam!

Just a small note: at the ending you use “today” for the first time in the second verse, creating a 3 beat repeat of the word, which breaks the rhythm: “The storm passes today Today, Today”. I feel like “the storm passes this day” would fit better ( •̯́ ₃ •̯̀)

excuse my editor brain (っ- ‸ - ς)

[Dissolved]

I decided to write some four-line poems to limit myself. Here they are, even if they’re not very good.

Poems, some mentions of blood and animal innards

Limbs of trees
And trees of limbs
Grow beneath
A blood-soaked hill

Long breaths
Taken and counted
Darkness awaited yet encroaching
Into the world of dreams

Tensing muscles
The feeling beside eyes
Along shoulders
The winding spring of stress

The sun and the heat
Swallowing the tail
Of the tales told
And the fears faced

A velvet shag carpet
A few feet crossed by
Few feet, in silence
And midnight's darkness.

Long summers recede
Into short autumn
And the long winter
Marks and patterns on the plants

Reeds and flutes
Valves and trombones
Sound as plant-song
And machine-tune

The crawfish rot
Unsold and unlamented
In abandoned crab pots
Buried under dust and sand

Livers and guts
Spilt upon the floor
Eyes stare at them
Looking futureward

The roads, roamed,
All lead to Rome
Gold to some El Dorado
And silver to…

Wood, rotting, fruiting
With the bloom of fungi
In sickness there is health
Which surface hides and which reveals

An afternoon in the sun
Melts like butter on the tongue
Remains rusting slowly
Into debris and decay

Salt and meat, spices and herbs
The sausage sits in its casing
Ripening and rising 
To the point of its devouring 

Tea and coffee
A caffeinated sludge
Choked down and swallowed
Bitter alacrity

They were gathering wool, supposedly,
But they were woolgathering
Chattering and hopping about
Leaving the sheep, unshaven, to their devices

The road, a circuit, circling around
Like a metal circlet, the cyclist
Psyched himself out crossing it
And it all repeated—a cycle!

[Vyner_Vanderhumeken]

This is an old one of mine which I dredged up recently, and funnily enough I literally have no idea what it’s about. Genuinely do not even understand what I was trying to say here, or if I even intended a meaning in the first place.

I actually don’t like it very much, mostly just posting it here for bemusement

The television receives nothing more and its fairings have fallen away

into that much-known opaque void where shipwrecks make peace

Its back has been thrown out

And its head cut away by a scimitar or a jamadhar or a tulwaar whose bearer has taken it

To a wooden mausoleum

To let it rest and be forgotten

and fade away

As a youth I

–hands tied by a chain with a half life of a decade

–nose fixed at a certain angle and bulging outwards

Would ensconce myself within that vast expanse and absorb;

And about my head my hair the occidental wind would rip;

and I’d be at peace.