Crooked Quads

The crooked quad is a 4-line, rhyming, accentual-syllabic form I came up with inadvertently. The rhyme pattern is A/B/C/B and the syllable counts are either 2/8/4/8 or 4/8/2/8 in iambic or trochaic meter; the poems tend to be split in some way between the second and third lines, but what form that takes is pretty fuzzy. Crooked quads tend to be about two contrasting/complementary subjects, or a turning point, inflection, or revelation.

History

The first one I wrote is Nightmare Times, though that's actually a slight rework of a tercet with an 8–4–8 syllable pattern. After writing the later poem 2025-04-29-the-harvestman, I decided to give the form a name and group all the ones I'd written so far in a single place (till that point, they were in misc. quatrains).

Notes

In length (22 syllables), it's close or identical to the tetractys (20), Crapsey cinquain (22), and englyn-alike (24), though with a more flexible structure than the first two and a more flexible rhyme than the last one. There might also be some influence from the Kelly lune, with its shorter middle-line pivot.

Poems

  1. 2026-03-22

    Lurching
Pot-bellied harvestman-machines
Now duskward home
Low-garlanded with black fatigue.

  2. 2026-01-24

    Hellmouth!
Red halls where skinless lords hold court
All dressed in rags
The rich have shorn from poor they bought.

  3. 2025-12-20

    New butcher-kings
Invade our yardang palaces;
Pig-heads,
They swill their shit from chalices.

  4. 2025-12-12

    I spy a sign
Miraged in clouds of dead-and-done—
Perhaps!
The thin idea of the sun.

  5. 2025-11-20

    Astride the house
The titan ice makes candles quake—
Its prey
Burn life to keep the flame awake.

  6. 2025-11-15
    Sheet-Ghosts Who Have Yet To Die

    It's time
For sheet-ghosts who have yet to die
To skin themselves
And wave their flag, and fossilise.

  7. 2025-11-14

    From space
Our cities blaze with screaming cars
In parking lots,
Where once dark rivers spoke in stars.

    I think this also works as just a couplet of the two long lines: “Our cities blaze with screaming cars / Where once dark rivers spoke in stars.”

  8. 2025-11-06
    The Column Creeps Strike Back

    Grown without love,
Our cultivar of Column Creeps
Learns nothing
But to find more kids to eat.

    Follow-up on a previous crooked quad about the same kinda person/people.

  9. 2025-11-05

    Anxious angstroms
Separate the desperado
From Death
And legendary bravado.

    Some wording shared with a Crapsey cinquain from the same day.

  10. 2025-11-01

    Dim-bulb haloes
Glower over holy Europe;
Pogroms
Fuel the furnace, that we're sure of.

    Similar subject to a Crapsey cinquain I wrote the same day. Also getting a rhyme for “Europe” is a bit hard so I just went for a rhyme on the stressed syllable.

  11. 2025-10-30

    Stay warm!
These underwater seasons, each
A lifetime long,
Send icebergs crawling up the beach.

  12. 2025-10-25

    Never to die,
The corpse bureaucracy still thrives
Beneath
Our newborn freeform sea of lives.

    Starts with an inversion… it's so much more flexible than fixed meter.

  13. 2025-10-25

    Flagellants whine:
“If we were bred in sin and grime—
We'll come
To God through pain divine.”

  14. 2025-10-24

    North wind
Depressed and sullen, sulks and bites
Our cowering spires,
Who dance to entertain the night.

    The third line's kinda packed there, between having to shorten “cowering” to two syllables' worth and “spires” to exactly one.

  15. 2025-10-23

    Irradiate
Your hateful soul with corium,
The love
Of concrete angel Corazon.

    Concrete Angel Corazon kind of a magical girl name… I'm kinda pushing it with the rhyme there but there aren't many words that rhyme tightly with “corium” so I'm relying on the “cor-” sound and the half-rhymes after that.

  16. 2025-10-23

    Glister
The moon that sunbathed in the night
Seduced the stars
And turned them into satellites.

  17. 2025-10-20

    Bland businessmen,
On long invisible commutes,
Leave art
On pavements wet with rainbow fruit.

  18. 2025-10-18

    The amnesty 
Entombs our town in frozen war—
White walls,
Old hate cemented with our gore.

  19. 2025-10-15
    The Pulpit Demon (day)

    Through silver tongue
The Pulpit Demon has its way
With me—
Before my flock—I blush and pray—

    Alternate to the first version of The Pulpit Demon (night).

  20. 2025-10-15

    Delight,
Carnivorous horizon line—
Eat well tonight
As missiles fly by fools' design.

    Red sky at night…

  21. 2025-10-14
    The Satisfaction of a Cat

    Few things outmatch
The satisfaction of a cat
		Outside
The world unfolding at their feet.

    Half-rhyme, but eh.

  22. 2025-10-11

    I curse
The ghosts who float inside my eyes—
A listless lot
Compared to those who work my mind.

  23. 2025-10-10

    Scrawled in the ash
Of Firmamented foreign lands,
A curse
To mangle Parliament's red hands.

    Inverted the first foot here.

  24. 2025-09-27
    The Pulpit Demon (night)

    In church,
The Pulpit Demon has its way
With words tonight—
Its thrusts and whispers—make me pray—

    I later added an alternate verison: The Pulpit Demon (day).

  25. 2025-09-27
    How Come All the New Killborgs have Degradation Kinks

    Surgeoneers
Devised a megadeath assembly line;
Saboteurs
Milked the little death from their designs.

    I might give this one a more expansive treatment. Also, yeah it's 2 extra syllables per couplet.

  26. 2025-09-23

    The spider sighs—
After laying years of eggs,
She works
Her meagre field of cranefly legs.

  27. 2025-09-22
    Proserpina Survives

    Persephone
Dug deep inside her bridal vault;
Hades
Never thought she'd find a thunder-bolt.

    Extra syllable to round out the last line and return to Persephone's meter.

  28. 2025-09-21

    Slender figures
Lilt and roam beneath the bookshelves,
Shepherds
Of foresworn and futile scholars.

    Non-rhyming, but hey.

  29. 2025-09-19
    What Master Owns

    The golf course preens
Above the slump of houses' bones—
The flames
Have yet to reach what Master owns.

  30. 2025-09-17

    Play deaf—
The banshee anchored in the bay
Sings rusty screams
To prophesy our final day.

  31. 2025-09-15

    The cloudmarch
Spits irreverential rain
On my parade!
Besides, it all slips down the drain…

    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.

  32. 2025-09-12

    The noose
Is not in dialogue with you
Or anyone—
It meditates till we turn blue.

  33. 2025-09-11

    “Pere Avar,
That loathsome old pneumatic priest,
Killed God
To decorate his mantelpiece.”

    Fragment of a larger poem about a bunch of religious hierarchs discovering that their god is dead and blaming each other for it.

  34. 2025-09-08

    Our parcan god
Descends from heavenly machines;
Our hands
Burn hot to work the djinnic dream.

  35. 2025-09-08

    A smile of roots
Hangs sharp around the dying lark,
And tongues
And waves of worms feast in the dark.

  36. 2025-09-04

    The half-barbed fence
Wears tacky plastic wreaths in shame,
All spite
Beneath its faux-rose garland frame.

  37. 2025-09-02
    Wardrobe under the yellow leaves

    Our autumn clothes:
Thin sheep shake off their coats of rain
For wool,
And likewise I wear fleece again.

    Uses a similar line to an englyn-alike I wrote the same day.

  38. 2025-09-01

    No manifest
Could list the milky, idle thoughts
Where flesh
Remixes what the brain has bought.

  39. 2025-08-25

    Those lonely peaks,
Whose eldritch beauty makes hearts dance,
Wake up—
They yawn and stretch and—Avalanche!

  40. 2025-08-25
    The Sin Inventor

    Christ-robed,
The Sin Inventor hums off-key—
He takes no note
As demons sing in harmony.

  41. 2025-08-02
    Cloud Dogs (B)

    Let sleep
The cloud dogs wreathed around the fire
That Brother Moon
Has thieved from Sister Sun's empire.

    Started from the same point as another crooked quad I wrote that day.

  42. 2025-08-02
    Cloud Dogs (A)

    Let sleep
The cloud dogs wreathed around the fire
Where Sister Sun
Now hides from Brother Moon's desire.

    Started from the same point as another crooked quad I wrote that day.

  43. 2025-07-19

    I freely walk
An empty eight-lane motorway—
The Night
A manifesto for the Day.

  44. 2025-07-12
    The Prayer Demon

    Oilman!
You set your votive well aflame;
In black-gold tongues
The prayer demon begs your name!

  45. 2025-07-12

    Below the hill,
The dragon meditates and starves;
On high,
A Boeing nurses screeching calves.

  46. 2025-07-12

    A scorn of stars
Behind the veil of sun-vault blue
Whisper
All the things you'll never do.

  47. 2025-07-06

    You charm
With seafoam songs and dancing eyes,
While round your rock
A choir of groping corpses cries.

  48. 2025-06-10
    The Spider by the Door

    Against all odds,
The spider by the door survives
Careless
Giants, tossing coats and ending lives.

  49. 2025-06-08
    The Littlest Giants Like to Feel Good

    Split the mountain
Into little stubby peaks
Then sneer
And trample aeons underfeet.

    Slightly-off meter (first half) and rhyme.

  50. 2025-06-06

    Elsewhere
The stars align and time slips loose,
But here at home
Old History prepares its noose.

  51. 2025-06-04

    The asphalt grass
Returns each year with rebel rain—
Defy
The road, the world is yours to gain.

  52. 2025-06-02

    Plastic sheet-ghosts
Haunt the alleys of the forest—
Relics
Of the ancient supermarkets.

    Originally this went “Haunt the demons” and “vacant supermarkets”, but I felt like the current version was more coherent while still being strange.

  53. 2025-06-01

    Apocalypse
Will wipe the hours off the clock,
And Time
Will see what else it has in stock.

  54. 2025-05-28

    Tonight
The puddles dream of better times,
While ghosts flow by
In coracles of coralline.

  55. 2025-05-20

    The air alight
With shimmer heat and cyclops flies
Will drown
Proud inland men with sunken skies.

  56. 2025-05-19
    The Ballot Bastard

    Look sharp!
The Ballot Bastard's up the street,
Their pencil teeth
A cage for tigers craving meat.

    See also The Column Creep.

  57. 2025-05-13

    Decrepit bones
Enrich the earth they grace to fall,
But scars
Will melt away in fungal sprawl.

    Thinking back to a previous poem featuring fungus, creation and destruction…

  58. 2025-05-11

    Machine-wild men
Are grasping, snuffling in the dirt
For blood
To wash the bloodstains off their shirts.

  59. 2025-05-11

    For luck,
We clip the golden goose's wings;
Formaldehyde
Corrupts with stasis what luck brings.

  60. 2025-05-10
    He just left for holy smokes

    Sacrifices
Throw their bodies on the firewall,
Hoping
Soon their god will meet its downfall.

  61. 2025-05-07

    Neon creatures
Creep so softly off the storefronts,
Awestruck
By the incandescent stormfront.

  62. 2025-05-05

    Forgive
The last spring day its winter-cold
Soliloquies—
It's born, and then its bell is tolled.

    It was cold.

  63. 2025-05-04

    Butchers
Carve their meat from Ouroboros,
Each mistaken,
Thinking they will join her chorus.

    At first, I wrote this in blank verse, with the final line being “Thinking they will end her cycle”.

  64. 2025-04-29

    The harvestman
Who doesn't know his snowflake odds,
Swings blind
And nicks the face of laughing God.

  65. 2025-04-27

    Two tons of rust,
The car atop the scrapheap looms;
Unseen,
Its fifty tons of lifelong fumes.

  66. 2025-04-27

    The road is gone
That pointed to the city queer—
They pried
The stones to build a tollhouse here.

  67. 2025-04-27
    Paper Tiger Roar

    Outside
The sun laughs, dogs play, flowers bloom,
But bullet points
Still ricochet inside this room.

  68. 2025-04-27

    No-one 
Cries for fallen widowmakers,
But the wailing
Tempest looses more tree-breakers.

  69. 2025-04-27

    Low trees
Reach out to pluck your body clean
To decorate
With skin and bone and all between.

  70. 2025-04-27

    I miss
The pleasure winter warmth can bring,
And summer too—
I miss the silence as it sings.

  71. 2025-04-27

    Forget me not,
Collector of our feeble kind,
Amused
By all the words we leave behind.

  72. 2025-04-25

    Their touch
Still leaves me like a ship aflame;
I'll sink and sleep
Before this passion guts my frame.

  73. 2025-04-25

    The vineyard reeks
Of wine and blood in equal parts—
So strange,
Was wine not made to join our hearts?

    Hard to explain, but this was kinda written in a persona from a TTRPG I'm working on.

  74. 2025-04-25
    The Column Creep

    The Column Creep
With groping fingers hopes to hurt,
With words,
The rebels dispossessed of Earth.

    See also The Ballot Bastard, and the follow-up crooked quad about the same kinda people.

  75. 2025-04-25

    The burnt-out wreck
Will kill the tree that bends down over
Its corpse,
Bequeathing poisoned petrichor.

  76. 2025-04-25

    Coursers
Rush and bellow while wind winnows
Hiding places
For the meek o'the Earth who pray below.

  77. 2025-04-24
    Nightmare Times

    Watch out!
The Seasons' weary walls grow thin
And nightmare times
With cold cathedral eyes peek in.

    A rewrite of a very similar tercet, but splitting it over 4 lines at an obvious breakpoint with 2/8/4/8 syllables and a rhyme pattern of A/B/C/B instead. I'm gonna write some more in this pattern (or 4/8/2/8) because it seems interesting to me and I've been kinda struggling sometimes with the stricter requirements of the Crapsey cinquain and englyn-alike.