Crapsey Cinquains

The Crapsey cinquain is a 5-line, non-rhyming, accentual or accentual-syllabic form created by Adelaide Crapsey (1878–1914), inspired by haiku, and popularised by William Soutar (1898–1943). There are several definitions of different levels of strictness.

The simplest definition is that the lines have 1/2/3/4/1 stressed syllables. The next-simplest is the same, except that each line has as many unstressed syllables as stressed onces, so there are 2/4/6/8/2 syllables total. The most complex definition is that the meter must be strictly iambic or trochaic.

There are several variations, e.g. the reverse cinquain and the butterfly cinquain. The reverse cinquain's pretty obvious. For the butterfly cinquain, merge the patterns of two cinquains, one regular and the other reversed, so the syllable pattern is 2/4/6/8/2/8/6/4/2 or 2/8/6/4/2/4/6/8/2. You can also use the cinquain (and reverse cinquain) as the stanza form in a longer poem.

Notes

I've written using a mix of all the definitions except the simplest one, sometimes using both trochaic and iambic in the same poem (switching at punctuation).

As for speaking, I imagine the lines get faster as they get longer, with the longest line taking, say, only twice as long to speak as the shortest despite being four times the number of syllables. Maybe the syllables are shorter, or maybe the shorter lines have pauses. Either way, the overall effect is a slow start, then a rising pace, and finally a sharp cut or sudden slowness.

The form doesn't inherently involve rhyme, but I sometimes find myself adding rhymes, often internal.

Poems

  1. 2026-02-22

    Half-days
    When clouds cast winter into spring—
    A desperate darkening
    Against the dawn
    It brings.

    This is the 1000th poem I've written since starting regularly writing in mid-March of 2025 (You won't learn anything new), excluding fragments.

  2. 2026-02-01

    So cold…
    The desperate dead
    Who've burned all memories
    Collapse in bone kaleidoscope—
    Big Bang!
  3. 2026-01-27

    For sale!
    One taxidermied angel hide,
    Museum-quality
    I guarantee
    On God.
  4. 2026-01-27

    Famished,
    The rain-drunk earth
    Now sweats and salivates
    And opens up its million mouths
    And eats.
    
    Look there—
    The hilltop!
    The trees
    Disappear.

    A Crapsey cinquain with a little extra.

  5. 2026-01-21

    Storm reigns
    Throughout the land—
    That savage lilac sky
    Transfixes us with wrathful eye
    All night.
  6. 2026-01-17

    Rise up!
    Through mist and mud,
    Mosquitoes out for blood
    Rise up and taste the sun and feed
    The birds.
  7. 2026-01-17

    Red-hot
    Horizon slime
    All seeping through the clouds—
    Amoeba furnace burning bright
    Tonight.
  8. 2025-12-31

    The year's
    Midwinter sky
    Sloughs its rags of cloud,
    And in its last colossal breaths,
    Gives birth.
  9. 2025-12-31

    Precious
    Museum-piece,
    A puddle locked up tight
    In panes of ice, while docent sylphs
    Tell lies.
  10. 2025-12-14

    Rotten
    Dust-blown phantoms
    Murmur their final message:
    Even old eternity
    Can die.
  11. 2025-12-13
    Dead Languages Their Games

    The ghosts
    That live in names—
    Dead languages their games—
    Spread gossip in the tongue of flames
    And wait
    Calendrical millennia
    Until some other fish
    Crawl from the mud
    And speak.

    A bit of a connection to a blank verse couplet I wrote a while back. I also thought about ending this “Until some other race / Crawls from the mud / To speak”, and it started very differently when I first started writing it: “Twelve beasts / That once had names— / Dead languages and games—”.

  12. 2025-12-08

    Lost
    In the library,
    The claustrophilic cat
    Contorts themself between the spines
    And waits
    Till lantern-head librarians
    With atlas catalogues
    Reorder the world
    In ink.
  13. 2025-12-04

    Moonshot
    Glows painful hot—
    The light of brighter days
    All ripped away from earth in cosmic
    Spite.
  14. 2025-12-04

    Gripping
    Your purity
    So rigor mortis tight,
    You drip with spite and drop your lust
    For life.

    Some similar wording and a vaguely similar idea to an oddquain from the same day.

  15. 2025-11-28

    The hole
    Beneath the Earth
    Knows nothing of the hands
    That work the knife, that vivisect
    Our world,
    But our chewed-up gristle-Gods know
    When people pray to nothing,
    Nothing answers
    —

    I broke off the last bit to create a very short epigram.

  16. 2025-11-25

    Each house
    The last high monument to pain—
    Each son an epitaph,
    Father's chisel
    In hand.
  17. 2025-11-24

    We hang
    Our coats of rain
    And wander through the rooms,
    But storm holds court throughout our house
    Of tombs.

    More on the same theme as a haiku from the same day and an earlier Kelly lune.

  18. 2025-11-21

    Seizing
    The book of life
    In many-fingered hands,
    The earth devours each scattered leaf
    And grows wise.

    At first this read more like “Seizing / The book of life / In black embalming mud, / The earth preserves it page by page / In mud.”, but “preserving” kinda contradicted the lifecycle thing I wanted here.

  19. 2025-11-21

    In fear,
    The sun retreats
    Withdrawing all its gifts—
    Our golden clouds transmute to leaden
    Rain.
  20. 2025-11-20

    Beguiled
    By smirking stars,
    The magi waste their lives
    And follow lyric lies to find
    Void child.
  21. 2025-11-16

    Tonight,
    The city reels
    In starlit agony,
    As parasite humanity
    Digs deep.

    Some similar wording to another Crapsey cinquain from the same day.

  22. 2025-11-16

    Asleep,
    Our cities reel
    In ancient agony,
    Dismembered titans who forgot
    Their names.

    Some similar wording to another Crapsey cinquain from the same day.

  23. 2025-11-15

    Our sky,
    So tired of life,
    Now gathers dusty stars
    And turns a darker shade of black
    And falls.
  24. 2025-11-10

    Hear this:
    The City calls
    For scholarly young stars
    To fill our dull corrupting spires
    With noughts.
  25. 2025-11-05

    Standing
    Eye to eyeless,
    Only anxious angstroms
    Separate the desperado
    From Death
    Whose angel fingers coax a croak
    Of cold, serene contempt
    Before the crook
    Drops dead.

    Some wording shared with a crooked quad from the same day.

  26. 2025-11-04

    Listen:
    Though streets speak
    The city solipsist
    Hears only aggregates of slag
    And slurs—
    But in our collective dreamyards
    And the factory floors
    New dialects
    Are heard.

    Kind of a mix of syllabic and accentual.

  27. 2025-11-04

    But God
    Delays the end,
    And stays its teasing hand
    Before the holiest of holy
    Orgies—
    Maybe fear of disappointment?
    The waxy stars won't burn,
    Our hands won't grasp
    Its flesh.
  28. 2025-11-03

    Small gods
    Reign hard on us
    From suburbs in the sky
    And palaces above rain gold
    On them.
  29. 2025-11-01

    Haloes
    Dull and lifeless,
    Angels shrieking paeans
    Block the light on European
    Pogroms.

    Similar subject to a crooked quad I wrote the same day.

  30. 2025-10-29
    No More Work Or War

    Don't trust
    The swordhead sort
    Soliloquising drunk
    On paradise's endless war
    For peace.
  31. 2025-10-28
    Delinquent Rain

    Tonight
    Delinquent rain
    Falls up into the sky
    Defiant, drop by drop, until
    We die.
  32. 2025-10-28

    A message
    In ancient skies
    Sketched by solid lightning,
    But caveman chemtrail theorists
    Can't read.
    
    And yet,
    The words hold hard through silent years
    Reflected in our eyes
    Until their time
    Is right.
  33. 2025-10-28

    A maze,
    Your walls of death
    Crowd haphazardly
    With watching windows, pained and dark
    And jealous.

    I also thought about ending this one “sympathetic / Witness”, which still would've preserved the syllable count.

  34. 2025-10-27

    No care—
    Prepare the noose
    To hang the king of grief
    By order of the emperor
    Called “smile”,
    Whose upturned words are absolute
    And court delights all seem,
    Beneath the masks,
    All spite.
  35. 2025-10-25

    The wretched
    Of the Earth
    Escape between the lines
    And find an acid refuge in lives
    Unread.

    Accentual meter.

  36. 2025-10-25
    Gambling on the Bandwagon to Nowhere

    With whip
    And cap in hand,
    The barker–banker leers:
    “Your doubled nothing gleams like gold,
    You'll see!”
    
    Listen:
    The screams inside the big-top vault
    Aren't born from childish glee—
    Their clowns wear angel
    Skins.
  37. 2025-10-24

    Tonight,
    The wick that drinks the wine ignites—
    Your tender citadels
    Of strange delights
    Explode.

    I also thought about “harsh delights” instead of “strange delights”, since it contrasts better with “tender citadels”. Still not sure on this one.

  38. 2025-10-23

    Royal
    Corrosive eyes
    Corrupt the world to pure
    Unsightly gold and atomises
    Us.

    Midas didn't need the touch, he just needed to exist; such is the nature of the crown.

  39. 2025-10-23

    Don't delve
    The typewriters' ossuary
    Without an offering
    Or else they'll take
    Your teeth.
  40. 2025-10-23

    Against
    The bloody sun,
    A bannered plague of saints
    Advances on the ziggurats
    And preys.
  41. 2025-10-22

    Muses
    Clasp corpse-fast
    The pen Promethean
    Whose inks write over rot in living
    Blues.
  42. 2025-10-20

    The iron
    And abstract crown,
    Dissatisfied with living trees,
    Builds mockeries from which to hang
    The free.

    Going for a kinda ponderous first two lines.

  43. 2025-10-19

    To arms!
    Great spectral reds
    Loom titan in the sky—
    Our slaver's paradise must fight
    Or die.
  44. 2025-10-19

    Let's trace
    The scrimshawed bones
    Of better memories—
    We'll try to build a better world,
    Won't we?
  45. 2025-10-19

    Last dove,
    Fly out across this fossil land,
    Its fields fertilised
    With gunpowder
    And pus—
    Don't linger here
    Where even hope can rust,
    But find a place that trusts the dream
    Of peace.
  46. 2025-10-19

    It's time!
    Let's fill the graveyards of our minds
    With parasitic wills
    For colony
    And coin—
    Let's clear the way
    For bright-eyed juggernauts,
    For everyone for everyone,
    For us!
  47. 2025-10-17
    Devo(ra)tion as a moral right

    Too deep
    Inside the game,
    The anglerfish's lure
    Alights with rage and blames its prey
    For its fame
    And all the darkness, fat with eyes,
    That light can't drive away—
    But was this not
    Your aim?
  48. 2025-10-16
    Megastructure Fucks (B)

    In a haze
    Of cosmic dust
    And macroscopic lust
    The megastructure fucks itself
    Through us.

    Similar subject to another Crapsey cinquain I wrote the same day, but with the opposite sentiment.

  49. 2025-10-16
    Megastructure Fucks (A)

    In a haze
    Of concrete dust
    And mechanistic lust
    The megastructure fucks itself
    To death.

    Similar subject to another Crapsey cinquain I wrote the same day, but with the opposite sentiment.

  50. 2025-10-15

    Listen:
    The mineshaft sings
    And curses, groans, and weeps
    And you'll soon echo this cold soul—
    You're lost.

    I think the end of the fourth line (“this cold soul”) should run a bit slow. At first it was “this old soul”, which is a lot easier to put alternating stress on, but I think with “cold” it has more interesting scansion and deliberate flow.

  51. 2025-10-15

    I crew
    The listening post
    For the local lightning farm,
    So let me tell you something strange:
    God's wife
    Has lately done the work of Man
    And killed Him in His sleep—
    The Devil weeps
    Forked tears.

    Thematically kinda related to a previous Crapsey cinquain, I guess?

  52. 2025-10-13

    Blue boats
    In the deep blue sea
    Carry living hopes
    That gunboats crewed by smirking ghosts
    Deny.
  53. 2025-10-12
    The Man in Lichen Chains

    Condemned
    To fester in the tower high,
    The man in lichen chains
    Sheds spores of hope
    On the wind.

    I thought about putting the middle line in title case (like the actual title), but it somehow didn't feel earned, like it's not descriptive enough of the “Man” themself. Also, the last line used to be “Below”, but it felt awkward, so I replaced it with “On the wind” (condensing the first two syllables as a hasty, unstressed pair).

  54. 2025-10-12

    Brave words
    You said last night—
    Your vomitorium
    Poured out a crowd of phalluses,
    But no heart.

    My idea in the first line is to put emphasis on “words” rather than “brave”, for thematic effect. That side, the last line has one extra syllable but I'd condense the first two (“but no”) as hastily-spoken unstressed syllables.

  55. 2025-10-10

    They drink
    Effluvium from butchers' shops
    And belch the facts of life
    In column inches—
    Old tripe.
  56. 2025-10-09

    Never
    To leave this room,
    I'll join my flesh with wall
    And turn inside to birth anew
    world I.

    Inverted the first foot.

  57. 2025-10-08

    Fools fly
    While angels lurk
    And wait for better days
    When only bones of better souls
    Remain.

    Also thought about ending this one “Till every better soul they know / Is gone.” or something similar.

  58. 2025-10-05

    Tonight,
    All daydreams die—
    Our lodestars rise and burn
    To forge a black-hole path beyond
    Our yearning.

    I kinda wanted to expand this into a butterfly, but I felt it'd mess with the pacing.

  59. 2025-10-05

    Time rusts,
    And skeletons shall walk the earth
    In great unnumbered mass
    And cry for death
    To die.
  60. 2025-10-03

    The Great
    Theodiot
    Permits that evil rots
    Our vast and starlit library
    Of flesh.

    I couldn't decide whether the second line of this poem should be “Theodiot” or “Illiterate”, so I did both. Anyway, the phrase “vast and starlit library” comes from an old misread I made when I saw a blog post about a library of modules for the role-playing game Vast and Starlit.

  61. 2025-10-03

    The Great
    Illiterate
    Parades his court of flames
    Through vast and starlit libraries
    In fear.

    I couldn't decide whether the second line of this poem should be “Theodiot” or “Illiterate”, so I did both.

  62. 2025-09-29
    Windswept Glory

    From far
    The wind carouses night by night
    Through border fortresses
    And distant wars
    Echo,
    And private wars
    In hollow officers
    Are lost in silent cannonades
    Of time.

    After The Tartar Steppe/The Stronghold by Dino Buzzati.

  63. 2025-09-29

    A corpse!
    The Juggernauts
    Have had their way with you,
    So sleep and hope for better dreams
    Than life.
  64. 2025-09-28

    Ignored
    Beneath the courts,
    New moralist grotesques
    And cops recast as bureaucrats
    Rejoice!
    Through amniotic sewerworks
    Their headless king of cons,
    Leviathan,
    Gives birth.
  65. 2025-09-27

    Young tree,
    Your “ageless” trunk
    Was never yours, you know—
    Old Moss and Fungus now reclaim
    The weight
    Of all our black and humid gifts
    That let you stretch your crown,
    Your Heaven wide
    And white.
  66. 2025-09-27

    Lets coax
    An angstrom smile
    From iron expressionless
    Beneath mechanical fatigue
    At dusk.
  67. 2025-09-26

    Blood bursts
    As nuclear tumours drain the eyes
    And scorch the earth and sky
    And eat the birds
    Of peace.
  68. 2025-09-25

    Your roots
    Hang loose outside
    The flimsy plastic pot,
    Low white and tender limbs that stretch
    And die.
  69. 2025-09-25

    Beneath
    Incautious feet,
    The fence-piledriver's blows
    Alert the Meadow, nightmare-deep
    In sleep.
  70. 2025-09-24
    The Rapture Demon

    Behold!
    The Rapture Demon climbed from Hell,
    And all of Christendom
    That slurs and whines
    Looks swell.
  71. 2025-09-24

    The cat
    Plays hide-and-seek
    But vanishes in sleep;
    A little grief still waits for you
    Upstairs.
  72. 2025-09-24

    In Hell,
    The concierge
    Makes room for three more guests;
    The skies of heaven couldn't hold
    Their spite.
  73. 2025-09-22

    The Law:
    A million roads
    Encircle and enshrine
    The Wandering Jew, whose path divines
    God's Truth.

    A kinda Borgesian premise.

  74. 2025-09-22

    Our Earth,
    All planetary golf-course greens—
    The players richly hate
    Our sandtrap towns
    Between.
  75. 2025-09-22

    Decline
    To shrivel up
    On vines that tie you down—
    Just fall and rot in fruitful peace
    Divine.
  76. 2025-09-21

    Babble
    Fills the airwaves,
    Reaching up and bouncing
    Round the ancient tower's space
    Debris.
  77. 2025-09-20
    Last Corpse Alive Turns Out the Lights

    I watch
    Leviathan crawl on fungal legs,
    Lapping up the decay
    Of the soil sea
    Beneath me,
    Then haul up its dreadful weight
    And release its myriad young
    To the space between
    The stars.

    A kind of asymmetric butterfly cinquain. Adding to the roughness, it's accentual rather than accentual–syllabic. Anyway, I'm not sure whether this is about the total annihilation of humankind or a newly-immortal transhuman or posthuman exodus.

  78. 2025-09-15

    Those fools
    The trees are dancing in the wind!
    Their disobedience
    Will do them in,
    You'll see!

    Went for a walk on a very windy day and wrote two poems from the point of view of an asshole who hates the majesty of nature; here's the other.

  79. 2025-09-13

    Havoc!
    Our turpentine
    Cloudprows breach the skywall
    And bombard Kinkade's fortresses
    With Dark.

    Started from the same place as an oddquain I wrote the same day.

  80. 2025-09-13

    Blindfolded
    Fluorescent monks
    Flicker and stumble blind
    In the dark places where the moon hides
    Its bruises.

    Accentual instead of syllabic.

  81. 2025-09-12

    Yellowed
    Invitations
    Fade to dreamy mapwork
    Plotting futures in our unused
    Past.

    The same opening and basic idea as another poem I wrote the same day, but a different ending.

  82. 2025-09-12

    Yellowed
    Invitations
    Creak like shipyard timbers
    Hauled away to burn in death-dream
    Winter.

    The same opening and basic idea as another poem I wrote the same day, but a different ending. Also, I was originally gonna end this “Hauled away to burn for Winter / Warmth.”

  83. 2025-09-08

    Lonely
    Silver nettles
    Sag into the footpath,
    Hoping for a touch—a chance to
    Screw you.
  84. 2025-09-05

    Dull husks
    Of summer suns,
    Drained by fool's nostalgia,
    Hang tangled in the autumn haze,
    Dead dusks.
  85. 2025-09-01

    Yours/Mine—
    The Hand of God
    Grows strong in every tree
    That in its fall will crush the fence
    Between.
  86. 2025-08-28

    Pawprints
    Twinkle coyly
    In the dawn-damp garden,
    Laugh at all the constellations,
    And die.

    Similar to another Crapsey cinquain I wrote the same morning. I prefer this one overall, but I like the intro in the other one, too.

  87. 2025-08-28

    Pawprints,
    Husks, and feathers
    In the dawn-damp garden
    Mirror all the constellations
    Of the night.

    Similar to another Crapsey cinquain I wrote the same morning. I prefer the other one, but there's something interesting about this one's opening, too.

  88. 2025-08-25
    Hear this!

    Hear this!
    The master, War,
    Draws near the City Free
    Where no-one can agree our right
    To fight!

    Based off the 1937 radio play The Fall of the City.

  89. 2025-08-25
    Crooked Light-Years

    He walks
    A crooked mile,
    But look beyond the twist—
    His crooked light-years plot an arc
    Sublime.
  90. 2025-08-21
    Piranesian

    Thirsty
    Deep-sea branches
    Swallow sunlight's echoes
    In the Piranesian
    Abyss.
  91. 2025-08-13

    Avert
    your eyes, Sweat fire—
    All groped by hands of heat
    Beneath the cataracted sun
    of Man.
  92. 2025-07-17

    Omens
    Crowd the newborn,
    Fistfight for the right to
    crown her doom her or consume her:
    Last birth.
  93. 2025-06-30

    Feeling
    Coarse and caustic,
    Making myths and systems
    Out of broken glass and boiling
    Acid.
  94. 2025-06-22

    Each day,
    Our mother's disappointed sigh
    Catches in the cobwebs
    Thick with echoes
    Of joy.
  95. 2025-06-08

    Soon tired
    Of rainbow neon Soho clubs,
    The in-crowd paints the town
    In bootshine black
    Attacks.
  96. 2025-06-08

    Locked in
    Attic hope chests,
    Spores of an erased life:
    Bromides festering with gleeful
    Lynchers.
  97. 2025-06-06

    Feeling
    Warp-and-weftish,
    Weaving steel-wire cages
    For a future where I'm free from
    Freedom.
  98. 2025-06-02
    The 51st State of Mind

    Five feet
    Of spotless steel—
    This hood will wear the head
    Of any passerby who dares defy
    The truck
    (Whose windows never face the wind,
    Whose mudflaps don't know mud,
    Whose suburbs dress
    In white).
  99. 2025-06-01
    Sound-Booth Romance

    Amp up
    Sound-booth romance,
    A foley fantasy
    Where lovers' murmurs sleep in
    Drawers.
  100. 2025-05-30

    Numbers
    Astronomic—
    Universal learning
    Saddles us with cosmic burdens
    Of glass.
  101. 2025-05-30

    Cut-up
    Flatworm stories
    Spawn more unread letters,
    Filling all the shelves with holy
    Babble.
  102. 2025-05-28

    Holy
    Feet of rubber
    Tread the asphalt carpet—
    Dye it crimson in their honour,
    Won't you?
  103. 2025-05-28

    Feeling
    Free and loose-leaf,
    Risographic layers
    Slowly making sense together—
    In you.
  104. 2025-05-26

    No path
    Remains in stone,
    No fox's furrow, yet
    Our signs, though vandalised by time,
    Point true.
  105. 2025-05-25

    Girls eat
    Public schoolboy
    Helicopter daydreams,
    Then grow rich and unexamine
    Their lives.
  106. 2025-05-25

    Bright kids
    Are urbexing
    The new-build office parks
    Where the adults of today die
    Working.
  107. 2025-05-22
    London Over the Horizon

    Tonight,
    The dismal blaze
    Of cottoned sodium—
    Our cheapskate Götterdämmerung—
    Repeats.
  108. 2025-05-19

    Stand still,
    Unmoving clay
    In antimatter's path,
    Declaring only matter matters
    To me.

    Eh.

  109. 2025-05-16

    Feeling
    Stricken benthic,
    Peering up at lightships
    Latching on to angels' anchors
    In hope.
  110. 2025-05-15
    Etaoin Shrdlu

    The shade
    Etaoin sighs,
    His tongue of lead too soft
    To move cold Pluto's iron soul
    To tears.
    
    “To tears!”
    This psychopomp of ignorance
    And poisoner of wells
    Was one more pawn
    For toil.
  111. 2025-05-13

    Rehearse
    Your corpse at dusk?
    You'll never get the part
    By wasting life imagining
    Your death.
  112. 2025-05-13
    Jerusalem Revisited

    “Halal”
    And “ninja swords”
    And “voodoo medicine”—
    Let's keep such violence out of
    England,
    Where we wash bloodstains out with blood,
    We waitlist you from life,
    We masturbate
    To death.
  113. 2025-05-12

    Children
    Don't march neatly
    Till you beat the joy from them—
    Then all bets are off, it's deathcamp
    Playtime.
  114. 2025-05-10

    Even
    Emperors must
    Groom themselves and put their
    Necks beneath the barber's errant
    Razor.
  115. 2025-05-09
    Playing in the Margin

    Surfing
    In the backwash
    Of Devourer Europe;
    Please ignore the bodies, they are
    						normal.
    
    Close-up:
    Please don't ask about the children's
    Toys (how worn with ages),
    					finger-paintings,
    								poems.

    Follow-up on a previous poem.

  116. 2025-05-09

    Feeling
    Thrum and vesper,
    Chafe against my tether
    To a world of midday paper
    Lifetimes.
  117. 2025-05-05

    Surfing
    In the backwash
    Of Devourer Europe;
    Please ignore the bodies, they are
    						normal.

    Expanded in a later poem.

  118. 2025-05-03

    “Kinghead,
    They've identified the body
    Found at God-damned Graceland.”
    “Elvis again?”
    “Ayup.”
  119. 2025-04-30
    We turn a profit on every house built Wrong

    It wails
    Beneath the roof—
    Suburban demonhosts
    Have caught the spirit of the air
    For cheap.
  120. 2025-04-30

    The nerves
    An orchestra,
    Its players out of tune,
    Yet in their millions, harmonies
    Of you.
  121. 2025-04-30

    Saviour
    Resurrecting
    Plainly, without warning,
    All the birds that hit your windows;
    Gospel.
  122. 2025-04-30

    Revise
    Nuclear physics:
    What holds “us” together
    So violently tears apart
    Our selves.
  123. 2025-04-30

    I work
    The starlight shift
    At Cadaveryard Five—
    They brought in the body of God
    And prayed.
  124. 2025-04-29

    The sun
    Still marches proud,
    Not knowing of the pain
    Its bleaching footprints leave behind
    In night.
  125. 2025-04-29

    Breathe slow.
    Don't wake the kings
    Whose jesters slipped their bonds
    And fled these ageless palaces
    To die.
  126. 2025-04-28

    The sun
    Will remain young
    Even on its deathbed;
    Spitting fury happy madness
    Alone.
  127. 2025-04-27
    The Hedge

    Machines
    Obliterate
    The fortress of the meek
    Whose armies will inherit Earth
    In time.
  128. 2025-04-26

    The din
    Of churchspire buoys
    Can't bring the sinners in—
    Beneath the seas of apple trees
    We sing.

    Same inspiration as a haiku I wrote the same day.

  129. 2025-04-25

    A chair
    Alone amidst
    The trees its roots once knew,
    To boast of all the rich behinds
    It seats.
  130. 2025-04-24
    The Stage, a World

    Enter.
    
    Spit on a fate
    Of playing chorus roles
    In someone else's one-man show,
    Or worse,
    In Act Three of a one-act play,
    The audience all gone.
    
    Exit, pursued
    by fear.
  131. 2025-04-24

    Feeling
    Far and yardang,
    Waiting for the winnow;
    Blow my dust away to cosmic
    Beaches.
  132. 2025-04-24

    Afraid
    To leap and fly
    And plunge like burning pitch,
    I wait up here where hungry stars
    Can't reach.
  133. 2025-04-23

    Just wait:
    The shepherd Wind
    Collects its rainfall flock
    With crooked fingers gentle as
    The Sun.
  134. 2025-04-22

    Nettle
    Seeking dock leaf
    For a dirty threesome
    Of ankle sadomasochism
    —Call me
  135. 2025-04-22

    Listen:
    The cold and dark
    Prepare their rusty knives
    For when the universe again
    Makes sense.
  136. 2025-04-22

    I saw
    Their body was
    A sacred palimpsest
    Of bad ideas, faith in every
    Saviour.
  137. 2025-04-22

    Fingers
    With angels' grace
    Attach to torturers'
    Throats and sweetly coax a porcelain
    Stillness.
  138. 2025-04-22

    A gift
    From you to me you
    But through my weary hands—
    To drudge for your contentment is
    No gift.
  139. 2025-04-20

    Hush dear,
    A tree just fell,
    Collapsing every clade
    Into the singularity
    Where we,
    Mother Moss and Father Fungus,
    Weave a fleshy cosmos
    Yet no lesser
    Than yours.

    At first I wrote “Gently / Moss and lichen / Nurse the fallen timber / Once so regal, never more to / See stars”, but that just felt weak.

  140. 2025-04-19

    Traveller!
    From the diner's
    Greasy panopticon,
    The weary road unfolds itself
    For you.
  141. 2025-04-19

    Message
    From the future:
    “Stain me all you like with
    Mercy tender—I will never
    Forgive.”

    Nothing to do with the other Crapsey cinquain that starts the same, I just wanted to try variations from the opening lines.

  142. 2025-04-19

    Message
    From the future:
    “I can't wait to meet you
    So there's someone else to talk to.
    —Charon”

    Nothing to do with the other Crapsey cinquain that starts the same, I just wanted to try variations from the opening lines.

  143. 2025-04-19

    Click–flash!
    The crowd agape,
    Who stomach any pain;
    The boxers' kiss will break this egg
    And fly.
  144. 2025-04-18

    Unmet
    At crossroads foul,
    The waiting devil sweats—
    And later he donates the Blues
    To toads.
  145. 2025-04-18

    Gaudy
    Trumpets blare yet
    Hide nor hair is seen of
    God the king obscene anon at
    His feast.
  146. 2025-04-18

    Emit:
    The furnace breathes
    One living smoke and flame—
    A dryad born, the soot and slag
    Her name.
  147. 2025-04-12

    Old man,
    Does this thin road,
    This crooked path of stones,
    This feeble furrow in the grass,
    Lead home?

    Inspired by various short stories by Dino Buzzati.

  148. 2025-04-10

    They shot
    The preacher's son
    For treason to his race—
    At least, that's what the papers said
    In choir.
  149. 2025-04-10

    Never
    In a million,
    Once in a billion,
    Any more than that is quite
    Prosaic.
  150. 2025-04-10

    Feeling
    Vast and seaglass,
    Never knowing whether
    This is it, the chip, the shatter—
    Green stars.
  151. 2025-04-08

    Pebble
    Beaches freckled
    With a world's detritus—
    Can you see the world within a
    Pebble?
  152. 2025-04-07
    Noctilucent

    Look up:
    The fishbone clouds
    Still catch the light of day
    From half the sleeping world away
    And swim.
  153. 2025-04-07
    Fleet

    Oh knight,
    Our prince is weeping in the cistern—
    There's nothing you can do
    To bear an angel's
    Sins.
  154. 2025-04-02

    Nightcrawlers
    Thieving glimpses
    Cut the purse of time—
    We see things we didn't want to
    Again.
  155. 2025-04-02

    I find
    Utopia's
    High cardinalities
    Where my imagination fails;
    I climb.
  156. 2025-03-31

    This stone
    Who will outlive me
    Has witnessed black aeons,
    But bursts anew with youth through my
    Regard.

    Variant on a poem I wrote the day before.

  157. 2025-03-30

    These stones
    Who will outlive us
    Have witnessed black aeons,
    But each is born anew each moment
    Through us.
  158. 2025-03-21

    Rotate;
    A plastic bag;
    It's hanging from a branch;
    Whatever stinks, it stinks like hell;
    Wet shit?
  159. 2025-03-14
    You won't learn anything new

    Good Lord,
    Please save me from
    These lurid fever-dreams
    Of broken empire bubbled up
    From Hell.
    
    And yet,
    Who doesn't like to see James Bond
    Outwit a burly goon
    In paradise
    Tropic?