It’s a start of the “poetic fortnight!”

For 14 days in a row, I commit myself to composing… something that might resemble poetry. Considering my current absence of talent, skill, and even English fluency, I expect it to produce some absolute garbage. And I am happy with that. I would love to see streams of consciousness and incoherent nonsense, a la “colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” But I shall not fall into the pit where the wretched intersperse their prose with newlines and call it poetry. My poems can be tiny, they can be awful by all measures, but they must have a meter and a rhyme. I am fond of different types of constrained writing, but for now, those are the rules.

…

1. Gory Fluids

Double down, triple up,
Hitherto we quickly going!
Where the head was ripped apart,
Gory fluids overflowing.

2. We Bore

Deep into the planet’s core,
Where the spacious caverns glooming,
Where the dwarves their fungi pruning,
Where no human’s been before,
Into darkness that we bore.

3. DragonFire

No technology aspire
For the progress, more or less,
As the British DragonFire
With its lasers of finesse.

4. Moist Cell

In the darkest corner of the moist cell,
In which I was locked by shady creatures,
There were copses there, they had foul smell,
Maggots ate away their facial features.

5. Heat Fan

I do not care, I do not see
Why people get so stressed.
They have a home, they are so blest
To eat and have a rest.

You better not go outside,
Unless you want to die
A painful death beneath green sky
While tissues mortify.

But if I die below the ground,
I die a happy man.
For no one had a better spot
Than me, below heat fan.

For when I shut my weary eyes,
I see an ocean shore.
I’ve never been on shore before,
Before the mushroom war.

6. Christianity

You may not know, the tablet had
A lost, forgotten shard.
You must not kill no humans, lad,
Unless it’s a libtard.

7. Disobey

When you are talked to at the store,
Be sure to just ignore.
When someone’s knocking on the door,
Go lie down on the floor.

When life gives you lemons, you throw them away.
You keep every contact at bay.
The universe’s going to put in your way
Your fate, but you must disobey.

8. Little Butterfly

Be free, oh little butterfly!
No longer shall you cry.
You do, however, owe me thy
Blue wings, the color of the sky.

9. Another Leisure Day

Every Sunday I’ve been yearning
For another leisure day.
Yet I must be brightly burning,
As some people daresay.
Wasted time is not returning.
Life is not a holiday.

10. Testament

When I am dead, don’t bury me.
Don’t waste a single dime.
Don’t waste your time on rituals
Of faiths that aren’t mine.

My faith is called “efficiency”;
It gladdens God on high.
So when I die, just use the corpse
To nourish your pigsty.

11. Phil

From a tinkle to a clang
Sounds rise up high, and still
Through the suffering and pain
I can hear the voice of Phil.

12. Boomer

Sixty years that fucking boomer
Lived and laughed and slept and fucked.
We were not in a good humor.
His demise was quite abrupt.

13. Indifferent

Thou could not see how the coffin
Of thy Father caved in;
How thy natal star was shining,
Brighter than has ever been.

Heavy clouds were so solemn,
And the skies have cried all night.
Northern wolves thy corpse protected
From the lesser creatures’ bite.

Orphan boy, thou lived in torment,
But at last, thy journey ends.
Thus thou died, forever thinking
that thy world’s indifferent.

14. Demiurge

Before there was a single thing,
There were no things at all.
The engine of the universe
Was put into a stall.

But long before there was no time,
Before there was no space,
There was a man called Demiurge;
He had a lonesome face.

…

Retrospect.

I am glad that the poetic fortnight ended. But I am even more glad that it happened. Honestly, I am proud of my little creations.

Composing poetry is doable, but not easy. Like with any of my writing, I used a dictionary extensively. I used a tool for checking grammar and consulted ChatGPT on the intricacies of different words and constructions. Additionally, I used a tool that helped me to find rhymes. I was to the poets of the past what a malformed baby on life support is to the able-bodied adults.

However, the most difficult part of the process was not even connected with writing. The most difficult part was finding motivation, inspiration, determination, time, energy, and focus to actually sit down, concentrate, and compose. The necessity and struggle to find those things feels like a curse.

The process of composing poetry revealed several interesting things.

1. Initially, I thought that writing chaotic nonsensical stuff would be easy and fun and that it would produce beautifully profound pieces. I drew parallels with abstract expressionism in painting and noise in music. In reality, the path of the least resistance was often the path that was logical and coherent and made sense. It is quite difficult to compose nonsense and not look mediocre, childishly inept even. The results of such attempts feel shallow. It immediately looks as if the author chose the words based on their small vocabulary and inability to find another rhyme.

2. One can assume that the creation of poetry starts with an idea, with a clear picture of a world or a scene that you want to describe. And then, that phantom is carefully filled with fitting words. It did not work like that for me. Instead, I started with the words. I played with random words and phrases that came to my mind. Then I tried to fit more. It was an iterative process. For sure, I dictated some general mood, and it always ended up how I liked it most. But it was the words that were leading the details of the narrative, not the other way around.

3. It may be tempting to elevate the author and think that a poem (or any other piece of writing) is just a narrow slice of the vast and rich world which they imagined in their mind. In various reviews, we often see how people try to answer the question: “What did the author mean?” However, while I was composing, I was firmly pulled in the opposite direction. I believe that the author’s mind is just a narrow slice of their creation. And it doesn’t matter much what the author was trying to tell. For all we know, the author might have been a wild monkey mindlessly tapping on a keyboard, and it just so happened that the characters aligned into something that we can grasp mentally and interpret. We interact with the text, not with the author. The author is irrelevant. Instead of asking, “What did the author mean?” it is a lot more interesting to think, “What hidden depths can these words contain?” Instead of thinking what the author tried to tell, we are free to explore the vast and rich worlds ourselves, and it is so much fun.

So for me, in a sense, it is as engaging to explore my own poems as to explore the ones created by other authors. I can take one of them, forget what I was thinking about at the time of its creation, and interpret it to my liking. Let’s take the “Indifferent” as an example. What scene did I imagine when I was writing it? It does not matter. But considering all the clues and the atmosphere, it is likely that the hero’s death took place deep inside a boreal forest. What historical period was it? Once again, we can speculate and imagine the world in which it happened. The use of the older “thou” and “thy,” the stylistic capitalization of “Father,” the rickety coffins deep in the ground, the need for a solitary journey through the woods, and the presence of orphans all hint it could be a world roughly corresponding to our medieval times.

A piece of text, even this small, encompasses both a myriad of specific minute details and a vagueness of a plausible infinite universe. That’s a lot more than a human author could have imagined.