I’ve been working on rewriting the 330 line poem featured in part 1 of the manuscript. It’s been a laborious process, but I was not happy with the quality of the original version. I decided that a more complex / less repetitious rhyme scheme and stricter meter were both needed. The following is the result of a little over a week of writing. Some may recall that I posted the original last year. I think the newer version is far superior. A little context: The poem is meant to be written by an eccentric young woman. All her perspective segments in the book are captured in the poems she posts on the internet. The whimsy and melodrama are aspects of her character.
First hint of silver softness ekes through pane,
A faint sun’s bashful kiss in pewter stain,
As world disdains its death in weary shroud;
No loud, bright smear of rosy fingered dawn,
All drawn in bright pastel ‘fore winking eyes,
And bidding Lazarus from sepulcher,
To stir ‘mid Urbs Rosarum’s infant stone,
Pale bone, and thorns that prick the striving hand.
We stand in shadow, wearing only meat,
Retreating night still baffling dormant brain.
Awake! And tear the cords of yesterday,
That miring suck which leads old men astray.
Calypte perched on high, a graven imp,
As shades with whisper scrape and half-woke limp,
Bedecked in clinging cowls of neon tint,
All glint o’er swinging hands made rough by trade,
Parade along as by magnetic spell,
Indwelling all and calling on to work.
She lurks above the hanging spider snare,
The air all full of garments cleanly caught,
Not spot to mar the rippling curtains flung,
‘Gainst young and pensive star in its cocoon.
She’s turned away from her beloved seat,
To bind anew those dancing, booted feet.
On skin a cooling splash, in throat a drink,
As gaze is twice above the sink with blink,
Not ring’d round yet by webs of creasing care,
‘Neath hair of gleaming tiger’s eye cast down,
No frown to show she bears a cynic’s weight,
Though fate’s conspired to cast a dismal lot,
And shot its tragic dart into her heart,
In parting those she loves to distant dirt.
The hurt has lost its boil with futile steam,
And dreams are never truly lost to time.
Ah, Ire! Your weakened heat’s a caustic joke,
Most fit to pour for morning coffee’s soak.
The roving pupils give one final glance,
A fleet bird’s flitting sojourn seen askance.
Then down, the heated missile at her side,
To glide among those bound in common toil,
The oil that’s squeezed in miracle of bread,
A thread pulled taut by weight of refugee,
Decreed the cause of all who make the jaunt,
And haunt the halls of labor’s ancient spire:
The fire oft’ stoked by blind man’s falt’ring hand.
No grand design engulfs her tumbling joints,
A body turned to craft-worn fingernails,
Its sweetness drained by daily, dull travails.
Oh, Urbs Rosarum, bulwark of the coast,
An emerald valley forced to play the host,
Where tears’ new trial must make its mournful end,
Distended now beyond its former bound,
And drowned in hordes of singed and hungry souls,
Their stolen futures bent on stealing still;
No willed intent, a process loos’d of mind,
Defined in tongues thought lost to modern mouth.
The south has spat her teeming orphan brood,
All spewed and cast by nature’s thoughtless blast.
A beast may learn what gave its father teeth,
When laid out limp beneath a blooming wreath.
Her scuffing feet will meet the orange line,
At Lincoln street, then cross the city’s spine,
And seek a kindred spirit on the trek,
Reflecting back the world as part of her,
Unsure if her is part of it, or ghost,
At most another’s anchored memory.
Oh flee! Thou spirit of this anxious age,
To rage in silence while she gives you horns,
Adorns a barren trellis with her speech,
In reaching past the solipsist’s mirage:
An arm cast out against a muted scene,
As cold and gray are grasped by viney green.
Calypte makes a red and eastward veer,
At planar brick, the place of pioneer,
All serpentine, and clad in blue and white,
As night’s last looming sheet with silky crease,
Has ceased its supine rest upon the grid.
Amid the angles of the urban maze,
Unfazed electric tangles weaving fate,
In state of ceaseless motion ‘midst the heart,
Apart, the distance built by icy glow,
With growing space reflected on the face.
All as Narcissus lying by the pool,
And she alone is feeling much the fool.
Then Anna spies the one who’ll be her mark,
Her body roving through the seats, a shark
On tentative approach and sideways shift.
He lifts his gaze, a momentary scan,
A man of middle twenties in the back,
With pack of bulging store laid in the aisle.
His style is proper business class, though rough,
Enough to justify his hunching pose,
Composing with a finger’s flurried tap,
A map of tortured strain upon his face.
The stalking creature makes her subtle flight,
And slides onto the cushion on his right.
Et nunc Calypte sola pulchra est,
With happy spirit simpler than the rest.
Not fragile as a frigid statuette,
With fretting cracks all ‘round a frozen smile;
The filing kind, librarians of waste,
No taste beyond what’s given from on high,
A lie of manufactured culture’s herd.
The words are not their own, but seeds are sown
On stone with her, a mausoleum floor;
No spore can sink its teeth into the earth.
Begone, you hollow husks of womankind,
The world has tired of all the snares you wind.
Perhaps she’s traitor to the fairer sex,
And looks for beams where there are only specks.
They poorly fare, are given o’er to lust,
Not dust once like her elder brother race,
No trace of God save that from Adam’s bone,
Outshone in glory, curs’d to bear his child,
Beguiled by rising Techne’s lev’ling urge,
Converging to a eunuch’s tortured role,
And full of envy granted by that joke,
Evoked by passing time’s ironic curve.
Such is her lot, but with an open eye
To nature’s state, which one dare not deny.
Calypte wakes again to present mind.
The young man’s fallen back with sigh resigned,
His lightly clamping lids a flutt’ring blur,
Demure, defeated by that lab’ring strife
Of life weighed down by capital’s demand.
His hand still twitches, miming stroke of keys,
Unease so clear upon his pallid brow.
Allowing him a moment’s rest, she waits,
But baits with sharpened clearing of the throat,
A note of gentle prying in the sound.
She knows not when his journey meets its end,
outpacing hidden clock to make a friend.
Is she kind of like Shakespeare's Ophelia, and this character from Days of Our Lives? (The inspiration and voice actress for Harley Quinn) https://youtu.be/e-nP_NeP1FI