Tuesday, August 9

Doggerel in Dactylic Quadrameter

When Pharaohmagnetic was in his second-last year of high school, he and I whiled away many an hour perfecting the trivial; we played roleplaying games, we honed Magic: The Gathering decks, and I critiqued his (knowingly) terrible poetry. Recently, I read a thread on Jeph's boards about goth poetry, all of which apparently ends with the line "I want to die". After IMing him a couple of those off the top of my head, he replied with 6 stanzas he wrote Back In The Day, and I was forced by my irrepressible tendency toward oneupmanship to improve upon them.

Three days later, the poem now has 12 stanzas, and is separated into three quartets. I present, for your amusement and (hopefully) constructive critique, the following:

THE CORONATION
a light air on the future

Dire straitjackets burning in piles;
Skeleton corpses that stretch on for miles;
Predators painting on palpable smiles,
Where nothing but fangs can be found.

Chewing on carcasses pulsing with blood;
Stepping on maggots that squirm in the mud;
Severing heads that fall off with a thud—
A sickening, resonant sound.

Buzzing and hovering legions of bees
Spreading their filth and horrendous disease;
Swarming on bodies that rot in the breeze-
Spoil and Decay all around.

Evil and malice and hopeless despair
float sickly on poison that hangs in the air;
Creeping to caverns of agony where
The Devourer of Worlds will be crowned.




Rot, in the swamps choked with foetor profane
Wafts from the hoofprints he leaves on the plain;
Even the Heavenly Host goes insane;
His murderous rage is unbound.

Imps of depravity, heralds of doom,
gleefully gibber and sift through the gloom;
The beacons they light throw off pestilent fumes
and waken the carrion hounds.

In grottoes of misery, minions await
with tributes of hellishness, horror, and hate;
The crown in their talons, a king they'll create
With lust for destruction profound.

Tremble before the Destroyer Reborn!
The fatuous Fates flee a future foresworn;
All happiness rent, all pleasure now torn
as the drums of insanity pound.




The blaze of his villainy rages and races;
Burns his work blackly on all the world's places;
Gouges out eyeballs from innocent faces;
Cadavers contort on the mound.

Anguish and torture are speaking in terms
Of violent fever and virulent germs,
Festering flesh that is crawling with worms
Digesting the dead and the drowned.

Rivers of fire that flow to the sea
Carve out new chasms that always will be
Steaming with ashes that never agree
To rest in the air or the ground.

Surveying the desolate world he controls,
Raping a maelstrom of suffering souls,
Evil fulfils its nefarious goals;
Eternal afflictions abound.

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