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Chou Ryou's Poetry
Tatemono
In the sands of time, I am but a minor dune, but the winds pile me up, and I become haughty. No metal hulls here to breach; encroaching on skeletal cities, I become nameless, and the iron course of history engulfs me. No hint of shade would ever favor me - dusty and resolute, I spread my arms to embrace the brutal sun. It roars like another earthquake in the distance; my skin is turned to glass. With guts of concrete, I lurch toward the sky. |
City of the Circumpolar Stars
Even the stars have hearts of iron, cast like gun turrets: between steel and heaven we laid dreams of a thousand-year empire. Greased-aluminum skies glittered above our circumpolar Eden. In streets like silicon nerves, electrons paced - rifles ready to offer salute. Neurons drifted like comets until ice locked them all down. In gunpowder corona we stilled glaciers. Saltpeter still burns, though nuclear fire only warms the atmosphere. |
Static
I'll sear your world titanium white - gnaw the inside of your skull and steal your eyes away. Gunpowder cobwebs rustle like soothing whispers. He's there, digging in with spider-fangs, gnawing at my borders. Cloying and sticky, he wraps me up- hides me away between shining rows of mortars. In the roar of battle I'll steal your ears. I'll nibble you down to nothing - dissolve you, bullet by bullet. The shadows are shifting, growling on: tanks, just beyond the vale. And he's there, crushing words like shells from my throat - breach my borders and scorch my earth. Line my veins with lead; fill them with nuclear filaments. I'll chew out nerves 'til your body's boneless- fill in the holes with razor wire, and like napalm I'll tear away your skin. I've heard you can carve open your arm and run a cable to your heart- open your throat, run wires to your brain. They'll tunnel in like spiders. And just as soon, I'm laying eggs in your mind, searing nerves like venom wrapped in silicon. Your skull will be my fortress; Root and branch, I'll tear you out. |
Bikini Atoll
Captive fire paces his glass - he takes a shot, smiles, thinks nothing as he murmurs green-flame imprecations down the curves of her back. In bone and nerve she'd called to him; in steel and vitriol he'd answered. They paced the streetlamps, black as dogs, and whispered of the world's ending. Syrupy promises and too much ether drive her to yield like bomb bay doors. She hums, arclight-poised and slides across the seat - the controls still beckon, but the flight deck's his. Cracked back roads echoed with cannon - she mimicked their tone in hydrogen hail (cataclysm never seemed to grow old). And when the sky didn't fall fast enough, he cracked its crystal spheres. |
Board the windows and lock the doors.
Shadows pace behind, echoing my footsteps in the crunch of frozen glass- nothing there save eyes, prying. Teeth and claws circle trees outside the window, spying. In sunset's glow, I'd swear from black wood and window, red eyes stare. Behind glass barricades, we'll slaughter all reason - drag its corpse along the halls, cross its blood upon the walls. Winter's come with roaring mists to rattle battlements like bones in shallow graves. Snow slithers through my stronghold's fissures; malevolent hail howls in the corridors. |
Aluminum Dreams
Trip-slide-stumble across fogbleached iron; Steps take you nowhere, save deeper into the maw. Highways for the rats twist through jungle-steam as embers throw up fresh clouds - light the world like a dying sun and section it up with neat gridwork cage-bars. There was nothing off the catwalks you didn't know - chains sprawl like gut memories (past libido and into thanatos) trembling in resonance with steel on steel - the howitzer howl of inevitability. It's not God's province to grant you bestial innocence (that much got lost somewhere between hindbrain and ego); Id and terror prey on all creatures' nerves. Five, six, the banks of Styx - that tarnished crucifix will only weigh you down. The boat is already waiting, its razored keel grounding on the grating where white rainbows slaver russet and aluminum (tastes like fear) dawn glimmers between burn scars. Rip-slide-stumble across bloodglazed iron - bail humors and cut ballast - fresh leaks open with every step. Daylight seeps between the boilers, following your tracks with leaden-tread intent. Blind uselessness of fleeing snares your legs in vapors and the skiff's hull drops rust in your eyes-- Knives strike home like terror tactics, and all hope is lost. |
You have a very unique style o.o I'm quite fond of your mesh of technology and metal against the flow of poetry and well picked words. I must say the first is my favorite though, partly because it's the least dark and sinister and partly because of the final image being spacebound.
The one about spiders creeps me out, yet I find it oddly to be the best (different then favorite) of the lot as it makes full use of your foreboding, dark and futuristic style. I hope you post more of the like ^.^ |
I've always considered Aluminum Dreams to be the best poem I've ever produced, but it's interesting to see what people outside of my usual circle of literary friends think. Tatemono was actually written a lot later than the other pieces in this thread - when I was doing most of my writing, my style was pretty much all so forceful it's almost frightening. I also established a pretty solid set of personal cliches, though, and I'm presently in the process of trying to move beyond them. In the meantime, here's the first poem I wrote that wasn't crap:
It was winter when we met: the evergreens bent their boughs under heavy snow, and the wind was harsh, but I never felt the cold. You shone, then, like an angel, as your skin reflected the white of the snow. I’m the one with wings, not you but the snow followed you, dancing in your wake, and it followed your strikes - Did it adore you as I must have? But each lead was false, each inquiry I turned aside in humor as cold as that gray sky and the cedars shook with your anger. I see it clearly, perfectly now, spread out like my blood staining the snow: I never stopped fighting, never let snow gather in my hair, Because I know whose dream I was -you haven’t yet divined your meaning - And I had a right to know what you did not. With razor tongue you slashed your own lips. |
I can see where the personal cliches come in to play, there seems to be an illusion of great history behind each poem that simply isn't communicable in full with just the words. Do you write things other then poems? It almost seems like a few of them are from the same world you harbor in your mind and there's a big story winding between them, but perhaps that's just me.
It's a lovely effect whether it's true or not *laughs* Does that one have a name? It's beautiful, much softer and less metallic but still hard and meaningful. |
I think its name was something like Winter - Fangs Bared.
I usually write mostly prose, though I haven't had the time to work on much of anything lately, what with it being midterms and so forth. D: Essays and reading are taking up all my time. |
It's truly sad what school pick as "classics" and force young minds to read. Essays are just awful too, especially if you're in a place that uses the... um.. I can't recall the name but the form. Like "Thesis. Concrete Detail then two Supporting Facts. CD and two SF" for each paragraph.
It takes all the originality and flow out of writing. If you don't mind my asking, what grade/year of college are you in? |
Quote:
I'm in the year of college that believes that the ability to communicate one's thoughts clearly and fully to others is more important than "originality and flow." And you? |
The solemn moon lit up the tundra, but
chimerical glaciers beneath us perfectly betrayed our intentions - to bring down the stars like reflections off the ice beneath us. You are my integrity and my deceit. To the floodplains' torrent, I'd send freezing rain; my last drive for those last fifty feet of front line pounds like meteoric storms into hard earth. I would freeze the atmosphere; For you, I would bring down the circumpolar stars. You are my Mizar and my Alkaid: my bridge into the circumpolar court, you are as the Yijing; You are the undivinable order in disorder, my intergrity even in turning the cosmic order upside-down; for you, we would even forsake our ancestral shrines for the new millennium. 曹操孟德我人恋你 |
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