By Mark Tomlinson’s request, here’s the poem I wrote for the post-TestBash meetup’s poetry slam.

Recommended soundtrack: Pendulum – Another Planet

Curiosity crawls across

the craquelure wasteland

crows peck at the empty casks of bugs

hollow echoes report

passes in passing

failing at failures

nitpickety checking machines

trawling and harvesting ungrown

premature fetuses of bugs

a scrum master was seen

scrambling to escape the

creepy crack in craqueluresque surface

of the planet known as The Pisshole

he was never to be seen, we lost the visual

herders cajoling lines of code

snappy whips and contraptions

squeezing petrified lambs of code

faster harder

towards the horizon of deadline always

always too close

fearfully frightened of falling

into darkness

sliding over the edge of the known land

finding solace in the abyss of failed  projects

curiosity turns into dust

fat rolls of dust

waves of dust in an ocean of boredom

and certainty

silence slithers hand in hand with hopelessness

nothing new, nothing arousing

appears until a barometric change

rolls across

swish! swirl!

feathering swarthy faces and ghostly white eyes

’tis coming! ’tis coming!

lo and behold! dark and full cloud

in need of emptying rumbling

over the dry forgotten land

trickling, tinkering, letting go

torrents of inspiration

penetrating the craquelure

transforming, filling up

impegrating immortality

thunder approaches, voices distinguished

and nurtured by desert ears

tickling neurons, zapping grey matter

praise the voice of the community

we might be out of the woods

***

I’ve been writing stuff – short stories and poems – since I can remember myself. When I was 11 years old, I stumbled across Sylvia Plath’s poems (The Colossus and Other Poems in English with Estonian translations) and these changed how I wrote poetry and how I perceived what’s possible in poetry. Sylvia’s poems liberated me from trying to rhyme and showed me the power of imagery and word play, contrasts and emotions.