Shackled!
Breath—impeded.
Motility—a myth.
Tortured by your own
worst warden,
Damning!
Cinquain. 2-4-6-8-2 syllable count
It was all a sham
The song never played
The coupling of palms
never happened
The eyes refused to
meet
She never existed
A palinode is a verse that takes back or retracts something originally said. This is a variation on that. Here, I'm taking a fictitious memory and in what appears to be several moments of reflection, revealing how the previously remembered is understood to be false.
The impossible is
often only improbable,
Improbable lines often
connect in secrecy,
Secrecy is the mark of
lieutenants and vampires,
Vampires are more
afraid of themselves than you are they,
(They) never asked for
such appellations
Anadiplosis is a poetic tool where a line begins with the last word of the previous line. Variations are possible as well, (i.e. ending with an emotion, and beginning with same emotion etc..). Here I used it to create a short verse, where the tool itself is the feature.
Today, heaven lost
friends,
Friends, lost heaven
today
Love, through
ascension; Shrapnel was removed
Removed, was shrapnel;
ascension through love
Antimetabole is a poetic tool where a line is the reversal of the previous line. Here, I simply used two of these, combining the four lines into a short verse of it's own.
Vague stories, imbuing
impossible metamorphoses
I, alone, transcended
eternity’s illumination?
Rhopalic Verse is a tool where each word of a line adds a syllable to the word before. 1-2-3-4-5 is the climbing sequence for each of these lines. Combined together, these two lines create a very short poem.
Head on over to D'verse, where for this week's Poetics, I'm hosting an evening of short verse. The doors open at 3pm. See you there.
