Longer rhymes

Most of the rhyming poems in this notebook are short and most are one stanza, but a few are longer, and collected here. This group's specifically for formal longer poetry; free verse, blank verse, and prose poetry have their own groups.

Poems

  1. 2026-01-27

    The footprints fossilise
And wingbeats disappear
But Sodom and Gomorrah
Are remembered clear

A lesson learnt in pain
To never trust again

  2. 2025-10-21

    The birds
Cut sky with wing
To settle on the wires
Where God's own puppet strings hang limp
And still
A telegram of holy prayer
Transmits from where He lies
And feebly cries:
STOP. STOP.

The mountaintops are closing in—
They read between the lines—
The shrikes are tearing at His bread
And vultures drink His wine.

    A mix of butterfly cinquain and a more standard A/B/C/B stanza of two 8/6 couplets.

  3. 2025-10-13

    The house on the corner,
Chameleon charmer,
So quaintly its windows aglow,
But those who peer in
Do not speak again
And stagger down Widower's Row.

    Possible stanza in a poem along the lines of my KOLOSSUS poem, but more directional—weird horror about going down a suburban street that's Gone Wrong, with the first stanza being an overall intro and each successive one going further along the road and making the horror more explicit and known till you get to the end of the road (where the people who “[staggered] off” in this stanza ended up). The underbelly of Kinkade kitsch or post-war Shangri-La suburbia? Anyway this stanza would probably be the first, literally the corner of the street luring people in.

  4. 2025-10-02

    Left to rot in archives deep
Old silent letters start to speak

Dredged from inkwell seas sublime
Dead gaieties crawl out of time

Science sells its arcane tricks
At rendezvous with human ticks

Palaces are burning now
Our laughter echoes, then the howl

  5. 2025-04-25

    The broken bridge
For which the people laboured long
Now shatters ships
And lives again through lighthouse songs.

And I below,
My ship a ragged, drifting ghost;
If I die here,
Will poets trap me in that host?

    The last line originally went “Will poets add me to the host?” but I felt “trap me in that host” was more in line with my idea.

  6. 2025-04-21
    THE COMPANY INVESTIGATES THE EVENTS AT KOLOSSUS

    Old echoes of echoes
Still dwell in the hollows
Where fallow machinery sleeps.
The folk of Kolossus
Remember their bosses
Who stole what the earth tried to keep.

One Zachary Beacon,
Kolossus' deacon
Who managed the company town.
Fell bog-body phantoms
Leapt up from the sphagnum
To drag him down into the ground.

One Waylander Bayer,
The servile surveyor
Who filched the folk out of their homes.
The fenland possessed him,
Serenely unfleshed him,
And left him a golem of loam.

One Wellington Sawney,
The wretched attorney
Whose contracts left no room to breathe.
Awake, vivisected,
His mouth now projected
Froth-fungus that babbled and seethed.

One Conway O'Gorman,
The Taylorist foreman
Who shrivelled folk down to their bones.
White worms dug stigmata
Through his inner strata—
His skin gained a life of its own.

One Gilderoy Leicester,
The tyrant investor:
The bosses held him as their leader.
The muck of the lake
Delivered his fate:
To faithfully serve the amoeba.

The folk of Kolossus
Disposed of their bosses
Who stole what the earth tried to keep.
They hunted them, found them,
Abducted and bound them,
And fed them the Judgment they reaped.

    A kinda mean-spirited rhyme… I dunno, amphibrach just has that vibe to me now. A bit repetitive in structure, but I wanted to write some 'orrible fates and put a twist in. It all started with the first couplet, then grew into the first stanza, then into a skeleton of the whole thing. Anyway, this took a while to put together due to all the internal rhymes and so on, but at the same time I wasn't really trying hard to follow a strict system, so it feels kinda rough. Aside from that, I figured out the whole ending-an-amphibrach-line-with-an-iamb thing by myself and later found out it's a common technique (catalexy), so that was neat!

  7. 2025-04-12

    Hey batter batter,
Look at you:
Your turnabout
Has turned the screw.

But you know
I'll win yet—
Arc and whimper—
Make you sweat.

  8. 2020-04-20
    The Paperflesh Advent

    I heard a far tale from a trav'ler,
I heard of the mellified man.
I heard of the sweet panacea
That cannot be found in this land.

I saw only rot in the city,
I saw all its glories dissolve.
I saw death's pale face in each mirror,
A Trophy too withered to hold.

So I went out into the forest,
I went through the veil of black leaves.
I went out to cultivate heaven,
A Trophy till sunlight shall cease.

And they came, the ageing, the desp'rate,
They came to see hope in my plan.
They came to partake panacea,
A Trophy we built hand in hand.

But fate gives its gifts without mercy:
Our fortunate labours exposed
	Under the earth—
	Singing so sweet—
A Trophy in regal repose.

For if man can be panacea—
Imagine where this reagent will lead—
	We will escape
	Ignorant flesh
And transcendence shall be our Trophy.

    The opening poem from The Paperflesh Advent, my biggest incursion (scenario/adventure) for the eco-horror analog game Trophy Dark. It's basically the antagonist's perspective—an obscured overview of how things got the way they did as the player characters discover them during the incursion. I say “poem”, but between the subject and the sometimes-awkward slant rhymes (e.g. dissolve–hold) it's more folk song to me. The short couplets in the last two verses would really need to be sung in a sinister, ethereal harmony, though.