ludic verbosity for the win
AGATE is a crystalline canvas, a tie-dyed rock daubed with a paint-soaked
TOWEL and fine brushes, streaked with squeezed and shaken
SPURTs of colors from tubes and buckets. Even rock need not be mere bland
GROUT or gravel when in the hands of a Master Artist.
See more at Notes by Steven.
ERODE in pursuit of former glory that glory’s every institution:
STATE’s purpose to smoothe out faction by orderly succession.
WACKY quacks in bombast push to fore for faster diminution.
TASTY! cheered satirists then, who now groan from such oppression.
TASTY options and flashy packages
ERODE the resistance of self-control:
WACKY characters dance across labels to the music of
STATEd refusals.
The NEWLY-weds appear to take their vows:
he an old bloke soaked in BRINE,
she, the apple of his eye, his former PUPIL.
UTTER astonishment gluts the guests.
NEWLY a citizen; no longer a sojourner!
BRINE-laced tears beaded, then fell.
PUPILs expanded, entertaining with
UTTER gratitude how her grim journey had begun and just how far she’d come.
NEWLY found specimen, giant squid, eyes the size of dinner-plates.
PUPILs, slits in light, plates in the deep, always seem to watch you,
UTTER fascination, thrill for the museum-goers. What if it were alive?
BRINE? If I were in there with it? It would see me . . . it’d be the last thing I ever see.
Note: this one is a counter-factual allusion to China Miéville’s Kraken, in which the specimen no longer has its eyes:
Its eyes would have been twenty-three or twenty-four centimetres across,” Billy would say. People would measure with their fingers, and children opened their own eyes mimicry-wide. “Yeah, like plates. Like dinner plates.” He said it every time, every time thinking of Hans Christian Andersen’s dog. “But it’s very hard to keep eyes fresh, so they’re gone. We injected it with the same stuff that’s in the tank to stop it rotting from the inside. “It was alive when it was caught.”
Kraken, China Miéville, p8
NEWLY enthralled Scotsman’s visage appears in the
BRINE bubbling double-time in the cauldron, his
PUPILs dilated at the promise of power merely
UTTERed in his presence.
See more at Notes by Steven.
SUGAR, sugar, I’d love to buy you A ROSE,
but the florist’s shut and the car is broke.
ELDER, my elderberry, there’s no KNEED;
I know ya love me, and that ain’t no joke.
SUGAR sap pressure ebbing, yet bare arms stay held aloft in winter’s cold.
KNEED with branch knots, gnarled giant stands firm in time.
ELDER, awaiting springs, you watched our generations as they
AROSE, then fell. If you could spread our tales like a rustling canopy!
SUGAR, salt, flour, baking powder:
KNEED it along with a secret ingredient the
ELDER baker insists isn’t real, but doubts
AROSE when no one else could replicate it.