ㅁ The world descended, slow, in tiny steps to chill its atmosphere, to render stark its stony landscape, so the trees resist a wind borne from the east, alight with stars.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Category: Blank verse
Caveat: Poem #2711 “This winter”
ㅁ The snow continued failing to appear instead the rain persisted with its task. The trees received more water than they'd like, the sea was washed but surged, indifferent.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #2694 “Touring”
ㅁ Those Martians opted to explore the world. They traveled in their spacecraft here and there. The forests drew them, silent and alive. A bear, a deer, some trees - these things were real.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter). This poem is an intentional sequel to poem #541, and I think that context is important.
Caveat: Poem #2649 “The monotonist’s self-deception”
ㅁ These daily trees appear each day, and still you'd think I'd tire of such monotony; but each of them's unique, and proves to us the world's a space much bigger than our minds.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #2503 “An untamed character”
ㅁ I dreamed I found a typo in a poem, but when I went to fix it I could not. The typo squirmed away like some small beast, escaping from my cursor, while I cursed.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #2460 “An unwise wager”
ㅁ The sun appeared at dawn and seemed to glow. I stepped outside a moment just to see. Two hours passed. Clouds strolled in and set the tone. My mind was shrouded by their grayish game. I played my hand but lost to further rain.
– five lines in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #2331 “A visitation”
ㅁ The ice along the seashore spoke out loud lamenting its abandonment, alone: the tide had left it broken on the rocks. A duck approached, and clambered on the ice, assessed the scene, and looked askance, dismayed: but in the end turned tail and swam away.
– six lines of blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #2234 “How it works”
ㅁ the worst forgetting is when you forget that just before you already forgot
– a couplet in a slightly defective blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #2189 “Genuflection”
ㅁ The trees made gestures, showing exaltation, and clearly hoping they could fly away. The slugs were tasting stones on lower paths, that clouds prepared with frequent irrigation.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #2188 “Routine”
ㅁ The sun appeared for just a day, or two. Enough to dry the rocks but not the trees. The streams became a little slower then, but rain and fog returned to hurry them.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1249 “Inversion”
ㅁ Eccentrically, I don't use a bed. Instead each night I lie down on the floor. But that confuses things: I make my bed at bedtime; when I rise it gets unmade.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #2147 “Rooted”
ㅁ The wind, it came and pushed the waves along; they gently stroked the stones along the shore. The clouds extended, capturing the sky, and droplets fell to nourish all the green.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #2124 “The eventual reward”
ㅁ Despite my best procrastination games, the map took shape. Regardless of my aims, a steady application makes it grow and finally it looks like somewhere real.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #2057 “Preparing to travel”
ㅁ Another dream harassed my wake-up time and left me short of breath as I sat up I'd dreamed I was supposed to move again but running late, I'd failed to start to pack. A child was at my door and begged to know if I would take the time to pack my soul.
– a sexain (AKA hexastich) in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #2042 “Inscription on air”
ㅁ "As far as blah-blah on the words," she said... No meaning mattered once the tongue got loose, it made its own saussurean designs inscribed across the map of hopes and doubts.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #2040 “Another plan for a novel I won’t write”
ㅁ I ask myself if there could ever be a dream wherein the morning never came and in the end the dreamer would become a kind of listless spirit, all alone.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1984 “Still dead”
ㅁ In hospital, I realized I was dead: a ghost abroad in lands just dimly lit. I wandered past the wails of those in pain aware of only dust and aimless paths.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1931 “Duty”
ㅁ A dog was supervising traffic, there, imperious and proud, beside the road.
– a couplet in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1930 “A fine machine”
ㅁ I had a dream in which I stopped my heart There was a button down beside my bed I pressed it once and that would make it stop Another touch would make it start again.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1928 “Quotidian concerns”
ㅁ The snow began before the rising sun, but with the dawn it petered out, as rain. I drove to town as usual, again, but wondered if I should have brought the chains.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1927 “A ghost in the machine”
ㅁ In unrendered forests, oddities lurk, awaiting moments when the servers sleep.
– a couplet in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1919 “Shakespeare’s conceit”
ㅁ It's possible to have a dream, I know, that convolutes the mind's perceptions such that all the words the dream presents unfold in quatrains executed in blank verse.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1917 “Signifier / signified”
ㅁ What words could solve the doubts I have each day? There's nothing in these words to understand. Instead I trudge along as if bestowed with words which form a burden in my soul.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1915 “Morning perambulation”
ㅁ I took a walk before the sun came up. A vaguely pinkish cloud betrayed the dawn. The rain had paused to gather up its strength. A mist was gnawing trees off to the west.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1892 “Gangnam style”
ㅁ I took the subway into Gangnam's heart and walked up Teheranno, through the crowd, immersed in human restlessness, alone - until the dream unmade itself at dawn.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Here is a picture of the familiar streetscape in Gangnam, Seoul, a few blocks north of the main subway station. I was here every day for a few months in 2010, when I was studying Korean language full-time. So it sometimes appears in dreams.
Caveat: Poem #1890 “Or you could just say he tripped and fell”
ㅁ The dark was absolute, obsessive, blind; it piled up like an angry ghost, dismissed, and lashing out it sent the author down till spinning like a leaf he tasted mud.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1882 “How the world works”
ㅁ The world pretends by rearranging things, by moving atoms constantly through arcs, through curves of time and space in ways that cause the ghosts of complex things to manifest.
– a philosophical quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1877 “The ghosts of slugs passed”
ㅁ The slugs, they race across the road with hopes, expecting to avoid the zooming cars; but now and then the tires take their toll, and leave a slug in ghost form, free at last.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1864 “Arcata, California, 1971”
ㅁ The road is wet; the cars can make a sound evoking rainy childhood days inscribed by ancient time across the mind's expanse, that rise unbidden, closing off the now.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1852 “No, not nevermore”
ㅁ The sun was still a bit too low to see but dawn's begrudging fingers grasped the sky. A raven came and sat outside my room and watched me watch it staring down at me.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1835 “Summer’s hour”
ㅁ The summer here refrains from lasting long. Instead it stays some hours, and then moves on. Interpolated clouds extend their damp and dull suggestions lowered down to earth.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1815 “Phantom”
ㅁ In dreams my daughter comes to visit me: a fictive being made of memories. She speaks Korean, tells me things she's seen: I try to listen, offer short replies.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1814 “Chiaroscuro”
ㅁ The sun will sometimes make a try at shining and draw fantastic shapes on all the hills until at last a cloud occludes its glory with brooding landscapes made of pure ennui.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).