[Rigel]

I can see why you would do that. There are works that I've always thought of as subpar that others have liked. I'm not sure what about it appealed to me. I just really, really enjoyed reading it. Sorry I'm not more help. My brain is tapped right now because of my lack of sleep. |D;;

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Heh, that's okay. I actually have that happen pretty often. Everyone has different tastes. I'm glad you liked it, though. And thanks for reading. :)

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Aaaaaaand, one year later, Suze has produced... all of 1 poem! Huzzah!

Ultimus [M?]

I am to walk the country of dead men
with a ration of splintered glass
and a canteen ruined by bullet-holes.
Already, the air abhors me.
I have made a crutch of sick and wearied bones,
thigh and pelvis set with stains of life,
and I find I lack the strength to gasp.
They have hung a terrible stone from my neck.
This journey is lit by only the suggestion of a sun.

I take the first step.
I tremble with mortality
and falter.
No genius mind compels a corpse to walk.
This is what I have become
a locus for suffering.

Now sutured to the earth
a mesmerized visionary
feeling the thoughts of my own blood
as the hammers of God beat me down
and all that I have lost becomes my muse

I see... so much.

The propulsion of stardust.
The internecine romance of gravity.
I watch the seed of the world
blossom with ephemera.
Microbes in unfathomable armies,
the arc of the universe bent on their death,
the singularity of life
and on.

I see the first smile.
The first magical tea party.
The first awkward kiss at the bus stop on a rainy Monday.
The first fireworks.

But there's more. There is far more,
and I should be so privileged.

I see the first time a man laces up his own noose.
The first little girl to drown in the swimming pool.
The first best friend to die in a car crash.
The first backyard abortion.

And this is where I am,
this nation of carrion with its unknowable sky.
Nothing here is not naked.

The blasted-out skulls of child-soldiers.
The beggars and the brain-dead, every cannibal of sympathy,
miniature kings with uranium crowns.
All the churches reeking of napalm and salvation.
Recreational murder.
A soccer riot. A chemically-castrated priest. A death-insurance salesman.
A pair of slit wrists holding hands.


I would ask the sky, but this stone shall suffice.

How... how is this for me?

[Nexess]

BI I enjoy your withdrawal poetry so much Suze.

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Being... poetically unproductive (to put it delicately) of late, I've tried recording some of the poems in this thread. I'm... reasonably satisfied with how they came out.

Demogorgon

In Victory's Garden

This Aurora was my Womb

[Quiet Man Cometh]

Is that you reciting them, Sheol? It's always different to hear a poem after reading it. There's some kind of deja'vu going on here, and I'm not sure why.

[Suzerain of Sheol]

No, it's a troupe of actors I hired to give voice to my poetry. :P

Yes, it's me.

[Quiet Man Cometh]

It always throws me when I hear the voice of someone that I normally only text with. I forget your voice is that low. Never sounds that way in my head.

Neat tool though. I'm tempted to try it myself, but I'm a little scared about what I'd sound like. I always sound higher on recordings than I do in my own head.

[Suzerain of Sheol]

My reading voice is a few octaves lower than my speaking voice, but I know what you mean. :P

[Espy]

Your speaking voice is already pretty low. -can't listen right now bc class-

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Emptiness, be thou my God

This is how it is
to breathe winter,
to capture the last of those warm dusks
in an inescapable sigh.
An endless letting-go.

And the aurora is so cold,
describing the name
of this inanimate sky
as I sit among a trifling solace,
a rare, pristine devastation
and contemplate art,
my only company that
distant eagle's cry
and the patient seduction of the water.

But ever to return to the waking,
the dismal structures
of this material cosmos –
bastion of all my weariness,
the perpetual beckon
to the imprisonment of a heart.

Here, the hostel of dimming days,
this asylum of my disrepair,
my still-life,
filled with the unfailing echo
of those stifling breaths,
of self-destroying honesty

and damnation in dreams.

[Quiet Man Cometh]

Read the latter portion of it over a few times. It's interesting to compare it with what you described earlier when you wrote it.

[Suzerain of Sheol]

You've caught me. I must confess, my ability to pull ideal and Formal poetry from the abstraction of the ether without sullying it with the contamination of my state of mind at the time of writing is... less than without flaw. :P

[Quiet Man Cometh]

If it helps, I tend to write my poems out of order, and have now taken to leaving spaces in between the lines I write down so that I can feed other lines in between them as I think of them. I've written poems backwards on occasion.

[Suzerain of Sheol]

I actually wrote that in the stanzaic order of 1, 3, 4, 2. :P

[Quiet Man Cometh]

You know, I think I like it better that way, but for the line at the bottom. Not sure what to do with that.