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.
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