poetry

The Virus

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

birdblogwhichisforbirds:

Like Pilate before Christ, I wash my hands.
When soap rips them to shreds, do viruses
Feel pain? And can a virus feel regret
When it has killed its host and doomed itself?
No doves or rainbows follow the great flood
Of pus and blood that laid waste to the lungs
It called its home. I thought I’d killed my host
When I was small – the pale and perfect host
that I believed was not bread but the flesh
of God. My sin infested hands with nails,
Contaminated love itself with death.
But my infecting soul could only live
in Him. Survival meant I must mutate
into a strain of self less virulent,
that doesn’t eat or fuck or rage or sleep
or hope for anything other than Him,
or feel things besides shame, or love
herself.

I’d hide like herpes simplex in my God,
and scarcely bother him. It didn’t work.
“Can you not wait and watch an hour with me?”
I tried. I can’t. I’m human. I need sleep.
My fast fails, so I vomit, so my flesh
Insists on more. I slash my arms
to drive away my rage at you, the pain
only brings further rage. I’m hollowed out,
an animated corpse. Saints you run dry
Have tired and lifeless eyes but sparkling souls.
My soul is still a fetid mass of slime,
but my dark-circled eyes stare out
from a sick-looking face. I start to ask,
who is infecting whom? Why do the hands
that flung stars into space require a girl
an unimportant girl, to tear herself
to pieces pleasing him? I realized
I’m not the virus. You are. I’m the host.
I cast the angels out and heal myself.

But now the world’s more broken than before
(And it was always broken, always cruel,
Always riddled with plagues, always unjust,
Always oppressive, always full of pain,
Always on fire, but it burns brighter now.)
Temptation whispers “Re-infect yourself
with Me. There is no joy or peace on earth,
Only on the other side of the grave.
Give up on earthly good: nothing is good
but God alone. Abandon all your hope.
See all the kingdoms of the aching world!
Watch how they writhe around in agony
All this pain I will take away from you
If you simply bow down and worship me!”
Into your hands, Lord, I refuse to give
My spirit. I don’t trust omnipotence
To save me or my neighbor. Though I have
Almost no power, still the power I have,
I use for love, including for myself.
I worship life in spite of everything.
I say the world to come can fuck itself.
This one, imperfect, finite though it is
I will protect in any way I can.
Like Pilate before Christ, I wash my hands.

Tags:

#poetry #Christianity #covid19 #illness tw #unsanitary cw #self harm cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #(I might be reading too much into it but #–knowing that the author moved from Britain to America– #I feel like there might be some layers of meaning in the fact that ”neighbor” is spelled without a ”u” here) #(something about chosen homes)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

f4a4b51d03d1872d7d97f156519a02d0c100218f

copperbadge:

I thought today about a villanelle
I had an inspiration there and then
I wrote this in a spreadsheet in Excel

It’s hard to keep the poems rigid shell
On track inside my mind, so when
I thought today about a villanelle

I thought about refrains re-rung like bells
And how simple it might be to begin;
I wrote this in a spreadsheet in Excel

The line below these two, I brag to tell
Is simply coded as =A1
I thought today about a villanelle

And this stanza’s refrain, I needn’t spell
It out; it equals A3 and is done!
I wrote this in a spreadsheet in Excel

I planned to use this better, really sell
The bit; but flew too closely to the sun.
I thought today about a villanelle
I wrote this in a spreadsheet in Excel

[Description: The above text is pictured in individual cells in column A of an Excel spreadsheet. The sheet’s title in the workbook is “Sheet Two Villanelle” and to prove the truth of how it was constructed, Cell A23 is selected; at the top of the image you can see that it does not actually contain any text, but just the Excel formula “=A1″. This is probably Art, somehow.]

Tags:

#poetry #oh my god

These things the Fae would like you to remember

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

listing-to-port:

These things the Fae would like you to remember:
Your world is very big beside our own.
We are ashes crushed from cinders, one last ember
Left to smoulder through the Winter all alone;
The tower in the rowan-grove is leaning;
The tunnels from the blasted oak run under
The new estate, its solemn children dreaming
Of the slow descent of ravens like a wonder:
But we may not yet survive the next December.

These things the fae would like you to remember:
That straying from the path is never wise;
The beasts out there don’t care who they dismember;
Our night, as yours, contains a thousand eyes;
That wisdom is a salve against adventure;
That the knight who rings the bell at set of sun
Knows a whispered spell to save you from indenture;
That dismemberment can sometimes be undone;
That the dragon leaves the tapestry at midnight;
Pull the red thread, not the green, behind her tail;
That the ravelled thread will vanish in the sunlight;
That the witch has only smoke behind her veil:
Tonight the hunt will have another member.

These things the Fae would like you to remember:
The fruit is bittersweet and tastes of freedom
From those things you do not want to set you free;
Some say it is a trap, and you should heed them,
But some find though it a self they need to be;
That there is no riddle here without a catch,
No power so strong you cannot still entreat it;
That the tower’s wicket-gate is on the latch;
And if you do not want the fruit, don’t eat it;
That our time in sparkling runnels and in torrents
And in floods and gyres and mournful doldrums flows;
It will loose you from your hours’ weary warrents;
It will teach you things that every forest knows:
As distant from Midsummer as September.

These things the Fae would like you to remember:
That gold without its glamour is just metal;
That you have bled and burned from iron too;
That beneath the hemlock-umbel and the nettle
Is the earth that claims us all as well as you:
The gentle earth of May knows no November.
These things the Fae would like you to remember.

Tags:

#fae #poetry #death tw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

queenofattolia:

exhaled-spirals:

« Nonsense can be made to make sense by supposing some alternative context for it. At the start of his revolutionary work Syntactic Structures (1957), Noam Chomsky cooked up a nonsense sentence in order to explain what he saw as the fundamental difference between a meaningful sentence and a grammatical one. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” was proposed as a fully grammatical sentence that had no possible meaning at all.

Within a few months, witty students devised ways of proving Chomsky wrong, and at Stanford they were soon running competitions for texts in which “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” would be not just a grammatical sentence, but a meaningful expression as well. Here’s one of the prize-winning entries:

It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously. »

— David Bellos, Translation and the Meaning of Everything

#to be human is to aggressively do poetry at things for no tangible reason#(worth it)

Tags:

#still not tired of ”colourless green ideas sleep furiously” jokes #poetry #plants #language

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

alduranattackdog:

literaryhedgehog:

writing-prompt-s:

What the devil didn’t know when he went down to Georgia looking for a soul to steal is that “Johnny” was one of the fae who went up to Georgia looking for mortals to play tricks on. Instead, Johnny found someone more challenging than a mortal…. or rather, the challenge found him.

They were in a circle of mushrooms playing a fiddle sung of chesnut,

when was heard from the hickory stump  “Boy, let me tell you what.

“I bet you didn’t know it, but I’m a fiddle player, too.

And if you’d care to take a dare I’ll make a bet with you.”

Now games were their specialty, they played them oft enough;

So they charmed their face into a childish gaze and prepared to win some stuff.

A soul the devil was looking for, they scoffed at the very thought;

But this one fae was ready to play – for there’s a lesson to be taught.

The fae called themself Johnny, and said that “it might be a sin,

But I’ll take your bet and you’re gonna regret ‘cause I’m the best there’s ever been.“

The Devil Rosined up his bow, and made it hiss like a snake,

The fae eyed him slyly- a step forward’s all it would take.

They heard a band of demons back up that fiddle gold;

But it would take more than a sizzling score to beat a fae of old.

When the Devil finished, the fae said, “Well, you’re pretty good ol’ son,

But sit down in that chair right there and let me show you how it’s done.”

“Fire on the Mountain.” Run, boys, run!

The Devil’s in the house of the rising sun

Chicken’s in the bread pan picking out dough

Granny, does your dog bite? No, child, no”

                                      …

Nonsensical though the words might be, that one chant would prevail;

For it was sung with sorcery, the kind which could never fail.

Indeed they saw the devil bow his head like he’d been beat;

And he stepped inside the mushroom ring to lay the fiddle at “Johnny’s” feet.

Then he turned to go, but quickly saw he’d been deceived;

For no matter what he did, it was impossible to leave. 

The fae saw that he was stuck and said “that’s really quite a shame;

But you know, since I’ve got you here- why don’t you give me your name?”

GOOD

Tags:

#poetry #music #fanfic #fae #hell cw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

best-of-inspirobot:

tumblr_povzx4pbek1wt28zko1_500

 

tearlessrain:

tearlessrain:

this is in perfect iambic meter and sounds like the first line of a weird poem

Rule #2

Don’t ever hug a lobster when you see one on the street,

For decorum is essential when a lobster you must greet.

You may comment on the weather, compliment his choice of hat,

But crustaceans like their space if one should stop them for a chat.

Don’t ever hug a lobster when you’re strolling down the coast,

Simply nod and give a greeting, or a handshake at the most,

For a lobster’s first priority is formal social graces,

And one seemes over-familiar if a lobster one embraces.

Don’t ever hug a lobster when you meet one in the sea,

For a lobster’s spines and chitin make it difficult, you see,

And he might become self-conscious if you bring that fact to light,

So don’t ever hug a lobster, simply put, it’s impolite.

Tags:

#lobster #poetry

spoonierbard asked: You have an ear for meter as demonstrated by your rewriting of various poetry or lyrics. Do you ever write any of your own verse?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

slatestarscratchpad:

Not seriously. I can’t bring myself to write serious emotional poetry because it always sounds overwrought and pretentious to me; I’m also pretty private about my serious emotions. I do occasionally compose things for fun. Here’s a poem I wrote a long time ago which I don’t think is online anywhere anymore, called “The Battle Of The Nouns And Verbs”:

The Nouns and Verbs go off to war
Nobody knows what they’re fighting for
No one has heard any insult or slight
But they gather their armies and go off to fight

The Nouns stand resplendent upon the field
They have swords, they have spears, they have many a shield
They have grain, they have meat, they have beer beside
They have valor and honor and courage and pride

They have horses and banners and many a lance
But they stand in one place, and they will not advance
They stand as if they have grown roots on the spot
The Marshal cries “March!”, but his armies march not

The Verbs fill with joy at their enemies’ plight
They yell and they jump and they shout and they fight
They pierce and they hack and they mow and they slash
They thrust and they bust and they shatter and smash

But their army, though valiant, is short of provisions
They lack food, they lack water, they lack ammunitions
They faltered and grumbled and groaned and retreated
Distressed, disappointed, disheartened, defeated.

The Nouns and the Verbs both pitch their tents
And they dig up some trenches and take the defence
The war hasn’t stopped, but they both feel afraid
So they summon their allies to come to their aid.

The host of the Adjectives comes from the West
They are brave, they are daring, the greatest and best
Their weapons are shiny and sharp and long
Their horses are fast and their soldiers are strong.

But out of the East, to the beat of a drum
The Adverbs, triumphantly, finally come
They have carefully planned after war was declared
They are really extremely completely prepared.

Boom! Smash! Pow! Smack!
The Interjections launch their attack!
Yikes! Whoa! Alas! Alack!
The Interjections get beaten back!

You and I, hand in hand
Come all the way from Pronoun-Land
The king there wants this war to cease
So he sends us off with his plan for peace.

But the king of the Verbs sees through our lies
Says the Pronouns are merely the Nouns in disguise!
So you and I, hand in hand
Journey back to Pronoun-Land.

A month and a year and a decade go by
And hundreds and thousands and millions die
And the carnage and terror and bloodshed don’t cease
Till there’s just the verb “make” and there’s just the noun “peace”.

The two of them ponder the cruelty of life
And in vain seek a meaning from all of the strife
And at last, come together, and take a deep breath
And they bow,
And shake hands,
And they…
Fight to the death!

Tags:

#poetry #language #death mention

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

satanpositive:

Roses are red, that much is true, but violets are purple, not fucking blue.

 

feels-for-the-fictional:

I have been waiting for this post all my life.

 

marzipanandminutiae:

They are indeed purple,
But one thing you’ve missed:
The concept of “purple”
Didn’t always exist.

Some cultures lack names
For a color, you see.
Hence good old Homer
And his “wine-dark sea.”

A usage so quaint,
A phrasing so old,
For verses of romance
Is sheer fucking gold.

So roses are red.
Violets once were called blue.
I’m hugely pedantic
But what else is new?

 

ineptshieldmaid:

My friend you’re not wrong

About Homer’s wine-ey sea!

Colours are a matter

Of cultural contingency;

Words are in flux

And meanings they drift

But the word purple

You’ve given short shrift.

The concept of purple,

My friends, is old

And refers to a pigment

once precious as gold.

By crushing up molluscs

From the wine-dark sea

You make a dye:

Imperial decree

Meant that in Rome,

to wear purpura

was a privilege reserved

For only the emperor!

The word ‘purple’,

for clothes so fancy,

Entered English

By the ninth century

.

Why then are voilets

Not purple in song?

The dye from this mollusc,

known for so long

Is almost magenta;

More red than blue.

The concept of purple

is old, and yet new.

The dye is red,

So this might be true:

Roses are purple

And violets are blue

.

 

squeeful:

While this song makes me merry,
Tyrian purple dyes many a hue
From magenta to berry
And a true purple too.


But fun as it is to watch this poetic race
The answer is staring you right in the face:
Roses are red and violets are blue
Because nothing fucking rhymes with purple.

 

cryoverkiltmilk:

tumblr_n365jxa2ad1saxoooo1_500

 

hopelessromanticinspace:

Hirple – To limp or walk awkwardly

Cirple – An old Scots word for the hindquarters of a horse

 

nobodybetterhavethisoneoriswear:

“Roses are red, violets are purple,

My boner for you has caused me to hirple.”

…

My, how romantic!

 

wouldthatcreationhadformedmeman:

DYING. I AM DYING.

 

kiranovember:

Calling theshitpostcalligrapher! We need @theshitpostcalligrapher

 

theshitpostcalligrapher:

@kiranovember u better buy this as a commission lmao

tumblr_inline_pcrji9wuh61rwttv2_540

 

simonalkenmayer:

This post has evolved.

Tags:

#poetry #language #history #nsfw text #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog