Blades of laughter lie across the wind:
hints of elsewhere
fleeing from some ghostly fair,
some crazed and failing whirligig.
Someone rolls a famous eye and swoons.
The audience shakes its belly, laughs
then settles...
The night hangs like a rack, a score,
a cold compelling peacock –
its feathers made of liquorice with
stars for eyes: unquiet lights
that scintillate or stammer with the season,
gazing back,
painting faces on our fears.
We turn their sullen stares upon ourselves
to test and question every tablet, every song
and every half-grasped memory that
threatens to reveal,
promises to save.
We breathe in current keys
but this is suffocation:
lacking of success in minor things –
all others can be found a point of blame,
a ghost to stand as victim,
a slot within our concepts.
All gods and great ideas
have time and space to tumble
but surely this is where the fun begins:
from stardust coursing through the lungs
to lovers drenched in moonlight...
The scenery is changed
as constellations twist with time:
dating temple walls,
turning sacrifice through terror
into modern views of sin –
simplicity of murder.
Lightning guides the hero’s blade
yet guards the devil’s door.
Grace favours Evil, if it only dares,
yet favours Good the same;
and mostly these are bound up
to the hand that holds the hilt,
the pen that has the richest nib...
Dreams that fail are cast away as demons,
merely words, footnotes
labelled with some crime,
written off to wander like
lonely hieroglyphics,
paintings fading in a cave –
a family of prophets
jostling in the desert for a cue,
another chance.
But demons rise like visions,
fire for an honest man, if he is true to poetry...
Ages turn, act on act,
with slide and spring, limp and shuffle:
mankind follows, fluffing lines now and then,
but never coughs a comet of admission
that, by himself,
he cannot understand the thing he is.
Smile, he cries, for we have Love!
The audience roars approval.
Love covers all the options,
including masks to tailor maps
and kill our children, even as we cradle them.
But we need more than Love
with its physics and its theories:
we need to find the ford
that brings us to each other.
Stagehands yawn with boredom.
This is repetition, for all these things are known,
all these thoughts have
syruped through men’s minds
from ape to spaceman,
written or experienced –
drowning us completely.
The audience stirs, uneasy now.
Where is the Rock n’ Roll,
the Shakespeare they were promised?
Some Fat Lady limbers up her throat,
the strings are poised,
the curtain waits against a nod:
the future hangs upon a failing star –
new life through bright explosion
or a black hole lack of vision...
Drift with me, a moment:
the scent of night stock haunts the nose
but sails unknown beside the other senses –
beauty layered,
wasted by the limits we impose:
they have not, yet, occurred to us.
Art stirs us all,
unsettles us or soothes – but poetry:
there’s the hound that hunts the deer of dreams,
invisible but never quite impossible;
merely, yet to come...
So breathe through us, sweet demons:
words –
this is just the matinee,
we still have dreams to play:
a tour to take, of bright imagination...
Author notes
In moving this poem to the correct contest slot in the Winklings 100 series, I managed to lose all the kind, caring and thoughtful comments that people had made on the poem. I am truly sorry for this: this was their time that they gave.
In a list
A contest entry
- Winklings Celebrates its 100th Contest (A Series) - Contest K by Lyndon.
6000 points, ended August 13, 2008, 12 entries
Gold trophy winner
• next poem in this contest, remove from contest
Comments
1 - 24 of 24
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This is an absolutely outstanding write. There are no words rich enough to applaud it. Congratulations on the gold..this write deserved nothing less.
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Eloquent as it unravels with featurettes of
contrast treated indifferently by time and
grace. Exposure to the glimpses of cast-off
greatness and remnants of dreams, now left
to interpretation in their fade. I feel this
through and it claims one in the read. Blue
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and the future holds much for us still...
for those of us who dare to hunt with the hound for the dream; that elusive poem, those magical words , which I know are somewhere there in the future....if only I keep trying.
That is how your poem makes me feel. I hope it is somewhere near the intended emotion of your poem, for I can feel a muse trying to escape, the 'unknown sails' of words 'not, yet, occurred to us.'
I can feel the depths of your thoughts and I can empathise with the strong feelings you have portrayed.
I can see that you have spent hours deliberating over the choice of your words and the painting of your vivid images and personifications. I can appreciate the poetic techniques such as the alliteration and the apt spacing of the lines.
Your poetry is wonderful and artistic, 'invisible but never quite impossible.'
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Many of your images as you progress through this modern poem have antithetical contrast and balance syntactically:
"Lightning guides the hero’s blade
yet guards the devil’s door." This is good stuff.
Some becomes precious ... as lovers drenched in moonlight!
Now, the poem. Words are demons only when they represent the superstitions and ravings of uneducated folk to the realities of life. Words are symbols as certain as Mathematics has symbols to represent or preserve established truths.
This poem is misunderstood by many because people see it as an attack upon Faith. I mean, we may express faith in each other in words: an intangible, demonstrable but largely unproven, fundamental reality. Science is a process of enquiry subject to peer review. No argument!
Poetry is an art bound up in words, the weaving of words, the conveyance through images of purpose, meaning and ideas with passion. It is simple in its mission as an organic thing. It is sensuous. No one less than Milton agrees with this. The fact that he would find this poem unpalatable is because his cosmology would reject our learning and reality of the C21.
This poem is important because it explores a dimension as real as 'Paradise Lost'. One cannot attack a great poem because one's childhood precepts disallow you to.
This is a great poem.
Ronald Wiseman.
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Wow...loved this stanza, the proverbial fat lady singing as it were?
"Some Fat Lady limbers up her throat,
the strings are poised,
the curtain waits against a nod:
the future hangs upon a failing star –
new life through bright explosion
or a black hole lack of vision..."
A most extravagant and pensive penning poet, a poetic novel if you will telling the story of artistic passion and the incessant call of creativity. Yes indeed, a grand work you have produced here!
All the best,
mj.
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Great poem.
To me, the hinge is the ages turning, act on act.
This piece does so much of what we ask of a poem - there are too many startling images and layers of metaphor to single out the bits and pieces. It is fun to read. You can hear it in your head. And, for me, the most important quality of all, it is interesting. It engages. Just read the comments.
This is different from Shakespeare in more ways than it is similar but the reference is irresistible because it is narrative, sound, grand and ... well ... poetic.
I'm no literary critic, admittedly, but this is so obviously fine. I'll give it three clapping faces because I can't give it four.
Thanks for it.
Tom
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A very thought provoking poem, your use of mataphor was excellent.
Thank you for sharing this with me.
~Rose~
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wonderful i love the flow of this poem, i got the feeling life was being writen as a play and we were all the actors, besides the main flow of escaping our deamons, the metaphor and words used were great, it was a long one, but it read real quick great write
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Excellent
A very fine write indeed. I like the imagery you created. It is a thought provoking poem. Thanks for sharing this one with us.
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I have to speak my mind and although I used to feel along the lines as you; you are very very wrong. I am a science teacher I have studied all the science, but just because things cannot yet be proven does not mean it doesn't exist.
The danger in the deception that you pen is that if there is not such things as Satan, demons and Hell then why do we recognize the difference between good and evil why is this a constant battle in all of us.
Secondly I am going to tell you I have felt the intense pain and intensity of evils; Although I once thought as you that demons are only words I really strongly believe this is a very very big deception
If evil or evil spirits or the desires of evil are not real and there is not a difference between good and evil what stops the rapist from killing and raping innocent woman. Why should not the mass murderer go around killing whoever. Why do you feel mostly safe that people that don't have won't just go and steal you car not usually and when they do they have a consequence because we as humans recognize there is a difference between good and evil.
Saying demons are only words insuates there is no such thing as heaven and hell than what my I ask will happen to us in the afterlife. Why do great profits come to the earth teaching us how to be good to each other. Why when someone does good for someone the does circle come back at them 100 times over and the good from God keep passing around.
Not everything in life is concrete; maybe the word demon is used too much but have you ever touched the quasars that exist billions of light years away from our planet? Do you believe they are there all scientists see is the beams of light that reach our eyes. Do you believe that the earth is rotating and circling around the sun have you ever been in space although few have actually been out into space a majority of us have not. We take what science says and a lot of time believe it more in our cores than what religion might say, but God is above religion God is our creator and demons, heaven, God Satan all exist.
Thank you for sharing you do have a lot of talent. God bless you.
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I think you have missed the point here. I am not saying that because something cannot be proven it does not exist. That falls into the realms of scientific experiment and demonstrability. What I am saying is that there is, no doubt, so much more – so much that we have simply not thought of! This is where I feel that Art comes into its own: it is the imagination that allows us to think of things in the first place: before we try to prove or disprove their existence.
You stated, “The danger in the deception that you pen”
I do not feel that these thoughts are deceptive. When one side wins a battle, the losers are dubbed as evil, liars – people preaching heresy (i.e. opposing the winner’s point of view). The loser’s point of view is dismissed. “Dreams that fail are cast away as demons, merely words”.
I have used the word “demons” in this poem to represent “acts of imagination realised through words”. In other words, no matter how often, or by which method is used (State, Church, etc) to subdue or destroy it, imagination will always come back. “like visions, fire for an honest man, if he is true to poetry...”
You have made several points here that I am not going to respond to, purely because I do not feel that this is the right battleground for religious beliefs.
As a science teacher I am sure you will understand this: the points you have made about quasars, rotation of the earth and so on – and here one could add in everything from quarks to evolution) these are all either demonstrable or theoretically so. They can be ‘proved’ as having the same result when tested, no matter in how many ways or by which method - and are therefore accepted as 'facts'.
On the other hand, god and the devil fall within the realms of philosophy and theology. Not science. The notions of good and evil, no matter the names you ascribe to them, are purely relative to the situation and the observer. “dating temple walls,
turning sacrifice through terror
into modern views of sin –
simplicity of murder.”
The point of the poem is to “never give up”. Let’s never accept that this is all there is – whether we are talking about science or beliefs – rather let us, as artists, poets, lead the way to more and greater discoveries. And we can only do that by dreaming harder – and then telling each other!
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Many high points here of phrasing and thought, overall a very thoughtful piece... a display of philosophy and rhetoric asking the reader to examine some fundamentals... excellent work...PK
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a good poem though i was not that impressed with you capitalising words such as love and fat lady, i thought there was no need for it - that said, i am enjoying the poem without looking at such things. personally i think the poem would have no technical distractions without those? that is up to you to decide i suppose, but i will stress here despite my negative attidude that i did like the poem, it kept me interested, and thinking of life. so...
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Capitals
I appreciate you taking the time to respond to the poem - thanks.
In correct English a "proper name" is capitalized. For example, if I mentioned the president, George Bush, I would do just that thing. In the context of the poem, love is being shown as a "real thing", a specific Love, not general love.
The Fat Lady comes from the saying "It's never over until the Fat Lady sings". I don't know if you've ever heard that phrase. Another version is: "It's never over until it's over..."
Best, p -
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of course i have heard of the fat lady sings... there is still no need to capitalise it! and you mention just that, you also capitalised Love and other words, i was just using them as examples as there were so many to mention! you can't just focus on one thing when you are doing it with many.
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so many?
The fat lady is being described as a real person, with that as her name),hence the capitals. Good and evil are the only other words given the status of 'proper names' (specifics) but all I can find apart from them are those at the beginning of sentences...
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Beautifully expressed...with words of wisdom , the words in poetry to the stage will go on forever more! You have captured the full stage of words here , giving much meaning that many here will relate to. Well done, thanks for sharing
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all i can say is OMG !! lol this is truly wonderful and really made me stop and think on several verses ! i love the peacock part w/ licorice feathers- that was very creative and so different from other styles ! LOVE IT !!!
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wow, this is good! I wish you luck in contest
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You have such wonderful talent, and it really shows in this piece.. the flow was wonderful and the imagery was divine as well.. It had an "old time" feel to it, like something Shakespeare would have written. But that could just be me..lol. I really love this. You created such a wonderful image that was so vivid in detail!!! I wish you the best of luck!
Angel
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'Ages turn, act on act,
with slide and spring, limp and shuffle:
mankind follows, fluffing lines now and then,
but never coughs a comet of admission
that, by himself,
he cannot understand the thing he is.'
I recognise the influence of Shakespeare on your inspiration with this one. I was drawn to this stanza in particular, having reached such a point in life, to realise that 'self determination' may not necessarily determine where we are going or why and without some higher aspiration, humanity is lost and so am I.
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"Blades of laughter lie across the wind:
hints of elsewhere
fleeing from some ghostly fair,
some crazed and failing whirligig."
You're such an incredible talent. Always a pleasure, my Friend. 
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