Verses from Forgotten Lands

I've been rediscovering poetry.

I've loved poems as far back as I can remember loving anything - the feeling is embedded. Their rhythm and rhyme are linguistic currents that my mind is all too easily carried away by. They almost become catchphrases, or ticks, worn into my neural pathways.

For example, I'll stand up to leave when with friends and pronounce: "Well, I must away".

Not, "I've got to go", or, "I'd better be getting along then", or anything that a sane and normal person might say. That's because in my head I am reciting:

Far over the Misty Mountains cold,

To dungeons deep and caverns old,

We must away, ere break of day,

To claim our long forgotten gold.

If someone balances out a sentence with "or not?", or "or a lot?" then my mind is immediately with Edward Lear. And if someone says "Let's go", then my brain fleshes it out into "Let us go then, you and I." That's just how my mind works.

So I write poetry. Always have. Reams and reams of terrible words. Starting with naive, rhyme-obsessed, primary school stuff ("Beware the chilling manticore, the snarling snapping giganticore" - a particularly bloody and wordy monstrosity, that followed up on that opening blinder with "forest floor", "wild boar", "gore", "maw" and so on. I recall, with pain, that it lost out in a school poetry competition to a cutesy ode to a badger.), continuing through to the very serious stuff you write when you get old enough to start fancying things. An ex of mine was presented with a book of him-centric poetry one Christmas, for which the old adage "it's the thought that counts" was probably never more true.

But poetry is hard. Really very hard indeed. And I use people like Tennyson and Eliot as benchmarks for what I think good poetry is and ought to be, so my scribblings were always doomed in my own estimation. However, I then did something really quite cunning:

I co-created a fantasy world.

Ok, so the endeavour wasn't purely intended for this, but fantasy worlds require a history. They need cultures, philosophers, historians, and - yes, most importantly - poets. They could be good poets and bad poets, epic poets and comic poets. I didn't even need to finish anything. I could drop little extracts into the start of chapters and if anyone ever claimed that they weren't terribly good... well they're translated, you see. From the original High Imperial tongue. And they were much better in the original.

It's wonderfully freeing in an odd way. I feel the distinct pressure to not write bad fantasy poetry. Which I think (/hope) I do avoid. But it also means that I can turn my hand to pastiching epic, or to attempting sonnets with utter impunity. I don't need to worry about trying to be modern - I can just steal from the greats.

So yes, thus emboldened by an excuse to be less of a perfectionist, I may occasionally post bits here. Just to show that I'm alive. Just to reassure myself that the words still come when I call.

*

The Fugitive

Aiklan Tremetis

He falls from mirrored glances to the ground

Now stops and kicks the shards from off his feet.

You recognise his shoes; so as he runs.

Go greet him, greet him!

                                    Fine you coward, flee.

Its footfalls are a beating heart to you;

The oldest monster, aged leviathan.

Trade birth for birth, and equal bell for bell.

You coward, Aiklan. Never facing fears.

Night finds you in a stranger’s distant bed

With arms that hold you in a liquor’s haze.

...

...

Arrested from your sleep, you rise and run.

Now naked, leaving shapes of bloodied feet.

... 

...

Is he behind you, following still?

His heels your heels, with steps betraying echoes;

No track you find will wind its way enough.

Is he behind you still? No other.

Note: This poem is not unfinished. There is merely "a break in the manuscript text". Heh-heh-heh. (Yes, I am an ass.)