ㅁ Moods can be nebulous, days tend to blur. No one is listening, which I prefer: telling some stories to stones or to trees, even the birds as they sing to the breeze.
– a quatrain in dactylic tetrameter.
Category: Couplets and Quatrains
Caveat: Poem #1728 “The survivalist’s manifesto”
ㅁ Never consider the reasons for things. Don't even think on the hummingbirds' wings. Doubt all the logic the wide world presents. Let's all go back to sharp stones and skin tents.
– a quatrain in dactylic tetrameter.
Caveat: Poem #1722 “Thirty-fourth stanza”
ㅁ Kiamon thought about stories and songs, struggled to figure out what was her own. Only the ending seemed clear in the least, all was a blur beyond that, she was sure.
– a quatrain in dactylic tetrameter.
Caveat: Poem #1721 “Thirty-third stanza”
ㅁ Kiamon looked at the rocks and the stones scattered about on the slope by the road. Pointlessness dwelt in her frustrated mind: what could she do but attempt to survive?
– a quatrain in dactylic tetrameter.
Caveat: Poem #1623 “Thirty-second stanza”
ㅁ Kiamon struggled to push on alone, lacking the help her ancestors had known. Dancing the stories she'd learned as a child, Ghosts only watched like shy beasts in the wild.
– a quatrain in dactylic tetrameter.
Caveat: Poem #1608 “Thirty-first stanza”
ㅁ Kiamon looked at the city, its lights: flickering images limning her nights. Quietly brooding, she pondered her pain, but, in the end, she just sat in the rain.
– a quatrain in dactylic tetrameter.
Caveat: Poem #1570 “Thirtieth stanza”
ㅁ Kiamon couldn't help asking the ghosts. Late in the night they would lurk on the coast, drifting along the wide lake's rocky shore, helpless and hoping to not be ignored.
– a quatrain in dactylic tetrameter.
Caveat: Poem #1569 “Twenty-ninth stanza”
ㅁ Kiamon sat there and looked at the crowd. Tables were packed and the cafe was loud. Still, down inside, she felt empty as wind. Nothing was true. Her mood was chagrined.
– a quatrain in dactylic tetrameter.
Caveat: Poem #1568 “Twenty-eighth stanza”
ㅁ Kiamon knew in the tomb of her heart: All was a dream and she'd wake with a start Trapped deep inside some philosopher's cave. Meanwhile, she wept at her grandmother's grave.
– a quatrain in dactylic tetrameter.
Caveat: Poem #1567 “Twenty-seventh stanza”
ㅁ Kiamon watched as the sun tasted sky. Clouds were flushed gold and she thought she would die. Gusts licked the dawn and the trees failed to show. Angels cavorted across the fresh snow.
– a quatrain in dactylic tetrameter.
Caveat: Poem #1566 “Twenty-sixth stanza”
ㅁ Kiamon's mouth was all flavored with dust: tasting like stones and small hintings of rust. These were the nerves that she felt at that time: facing her fears, among trees clothed in rime.
– a quatrain in dactylic tetrameter.
Caveat: Poem #1552 “Twenty-fifth stanza”
ㅁ Kiamon knelt down and looked at the ground, searching for signs but they weren't to be found. Standing again, she began to decide where in the world she'd look next, far and wide.
– a quatrain in dactylic tetrameter.
Caveat: Poem #1534 “Twenty-fourth stanza”
ㅁ Kiamon boarded the tram down the block. Brownstones and brick walls began to stream past: cold-windowed churches, a tall, pensive clock, human creations - the city seemed vast.
– a quatrain in dactylic tetrameter. Kiamon lives in Ohunkagan.
Caveat: Poem #1512 “Litter”
ㅁ I find these things just lying in the road: a spring, a rope, a can, a metal bar.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1511 “Self-improvement”
ㅁ The cormorant was glancing up, askance, distrusting land-based creatures' doubting stares. A movement spooked the bird. It gave a cry, and squawking, flapped away to find a fish.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1510 “Ominous”
ㅁ A week has passed with only sunny days; this morning dawned with overcast, dull skies.
– a couplet in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1509 “Becoming animal”
ㅁ The raven watched me carefully and stared. She wondered if I'd scare her. I did not.
– a couplet in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1497 “Carbon cycle”
ㅁ The yellowness was from the smoke of fires that lurked and burned far to the south of here.
– a couplet in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1496 “Keep a lid on things”
ㅁ "What summer? Why is that a thing?" they asked. "The sky is gray to keep things down," they said.
– a couplet in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1495 “Reassurances”
ㅁ You know the world will balance out, they said. The rain will wash away your pain, they said.
– a couplet in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1494 “Prepared”
ㅁ The dawn suggested new approaches. So, rebooting my computer, I could hope.
– a couplet in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1493 “Distortions”
ㅁ The land and sea were blended into one. A mist was clinging to the darkling trees. Among the stones a boat's vague shape appeared. Or was it just a ghost? One couldn't know.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
Caveat: Poem #1492 “Illim’s origins”
ㅁ The desert claimed the generations' lives, but over time great cities took their shape. Arising from the flanks of hills they gleamed, declaring people's steadfast will to live.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter), about the aftermath of one of the many wars in the imaginary land of Illim, a small nation among many on the planet Rahet.
Caveat: Poem #1481 “Twenty-third stanza”
ㅁ Kiamon sat on the shore of the lake, watching the water that danced with the wind, narrowing eyes from a face that had thinned, barely remembering desert and ache.
– a quatrain in dactylic tetrameter, but with a different rhyme-scheme than previous quatrains on the topic of Kiamon.
Caveat: Poem #1457 “Twenty-second stanza”
ㅁ Kiamon acted without prior thought, forcing the hand of the fate that she sought, failing to plan for contingencies, then, marching off into the desert again.
– a quatrain in dactylic tetrameter.
Caveat: Poem #1439 “Twenty-first stanza”
ㅁ Kiamon sat by the lakeshore and watched: wind-woven waves biting stones where they touched, trees overseeing the greenness and breeze, clouds climbing skies with magnificent ease.
– a quatrain in dactylic tetrameter.
Caveat: Poem #1431 “Twentieth stanza”
ㅁ Not-a-Wolf wielded a sixgun and knife, Lived like he didn't much value his life. Soldiers pursued him through sun and through snow, Never once thinking to just let him go.
– a quatrain in dactylic tetrameter. Luc Not-a-Wolf is a character in a story I sometimes work on, which takes place in the imaginary land of Makaska. He is Kiamon’s great-great grandfather.
Caveat: Poem #1403 “Nineteenth stanza”
ㅁ Kiamon knelt at her ancestor's grave clutching the keepsake her mother once gave. Angels cavorted around by some trees summoning shadows that only love frees.
– a quatrain in dactylic tetrameter, on the ongoing angsts of a fictional being.
Caveat: Poem #1390 “Eighteenth stanza”
ㅁ Kiamon traveled to worlds beyond ken using her mind to find meaning again. Body in place, like a somnolent monk, worlds coalesced out of cognitive junk.
– a quatrain in dactylic tetrameter.
Caveat: Poem #1388 “Patter”
ㅁ After ten days of unraining, dull times, Clouds' tiny footsteps compose their small rhymes.
– a couplet in dactylic tetrameter.
Caveat: Poem #1380 “Seventeenth stanza”
ㅁ Kiamon thought about ancestry then, counting back mothers and fathers to ten. How did her elders perform at these tasks? When at last death took them, what did they ask?
– a quatrain in dactylic tetrameter.
Caveat: Poem #1376 “Point of view”
ㅁ Down through the railing, the tide had been slipping down; Cormorant possessed a rock that was showing there.
– a couplet in a semi-successful dactylic tetrameter.
Caveat: Poem #1370 “Lollygagging vegetables”
ㅁ Here I have planted tomatoes to grow. Their germination - it seems to me slow. Giving them water and sunlight I guess serves to inspire them to lollygag less.
– a quatrain in a dactylic tetrameter.