Caveat: Poem #1018 “Three signs of the apocalypse”

ㅁ
Firstly, we gazed askance at the spaceship
Plunging wild through the grim-faced sky.
Flares were winking on a trailing wingtip
Where a faded emblem seemed to fly.

Secondly, speakers sung with the voices
Screaming out dangers and proffering choices,
Hinting at various important things.
Dark was the mood then, beshadowed by wings.

Thirdly, our leaders emptied the city.
Multitudes fled to the sun-tortured hills,
Some of them starving while others sold pills
Which the wounded endured. Such a pity.

Endless miseries kept ensuing -
Doubts, above all. What were we doing?

– a sonnet in an irregular tetrameter (maybe).

picture

Caveat: Poem #1014 “Logos”

ㅁ
The thought climbs up astride its weary mount
  To better seek and target its intents,
  Infecting other minds like airbourne scents -
A viral dream where every glance will count.
A prophet then, I forge through these events,
  Betraying with my words their very fount
  And caring not at all - who could discount?
You see them, now, such cloudy, cool portents.
Let's undertake to rule the world's wide mind
  By sending out that energetic thought:
Its consequences gradually unwind.
And finally, behold what thinking wrought:
  Baroque descriptions seemingly designed
To lift a universe up out from nought.

– a sonnet in iambic pentameter.

picture

Caveat: Poem #1005 “A sonnet about trees”

a tree entails a gentle growing
a tree elides the sky above
a tree betokens time's dull flowing
a tree rejects the earth's cold love

a tree observes the moon's redundant
a tree points out the sun's abundant
a tree explores the air's canals
a tree will fail to show morale

a tree creates its own committees
a tree can drink the dreams of clouds
a tree provides the beasts their shrouds
a tree dislikes the teeming cities

a tree neglects its own biology
a tree reviews epistemology

– a sonnet in iambic pentameter.

picture

Caveat: Poem #1000 “A sonnet memorializing itself”

A part of every day just writing:
The sky is gray and raindrops hang;
How is a life like this exciting?
Oh wait, a bird unseen just sang.

Unfinished tasks remain regretted;
So forests' moods persist, abetted.
And still a thought will come along:
No fish will come; no time is wrong.

Despairing then, perhaps I wondered...
Preparing rows of trees or words
On paper or on wings of birds-
Exactly ten times, by a hundred -

Momentous thoughts and aimless streams
Suspend what's real. Behold the dreams.

– a sonnet in iambic pentameter.

picture

Caveat: Poem #993 “A draft of an impossibility”

ㅁ
in lines of glass or wood or concrete
horizons drawn in golds and blacks
a grid, a geographic spreadsheet
dead trees on hills like painted cracks

the cityscape reveals confusion
amid its planless, hot profusion
of means of movement, high and low
of will to commerce, fast and slow

the hearts of people all inventing
a way to make their neighbors slaves
or if not that, then find their graves
and likewise... stepwise... too preventing

our nature's hoped-for forceful claim
against our blind hubristic shame

– a sonnet in a defective iambic tetrameter.

picture

Back to Top