Tricky Tales

Saturday, June 14, 2008

I've been trying my hand recently at writing, not in the ordered, fixed-rhyme-scheme form that I normally write in, but rather in free verse. So here is my latest poetic offering:

Digital Love

We lie in a grassy patch
Looking up at the eternal night sky
And watching the shooting stars fly by
Like on a Windows screen saver.

You gaze lovingly at me
'Silent sniper of surreptition'
And I, in return, at you
'Lovely lady of the lake'.

I'm not really a dark elven archer
And neither are you a fairy princess
(Dark elves and fairies don't mix)
But, like you said before, whatever =.=

We've progressed beyond mere roleplaying
-The ordered realm of make-belief-
To something heart-poundingly real,
Not fantasy within a fantasy.

This is not quite Romeo and Juliet
Nor exactly Orpheus and Eurydice
We are not the stuff of legends
But at least we have a happy ending.

If we can transcend time (zones) and space,
Race and religion,
And the need for physical attraction,
We're not too bad off, are we.

We leaned forward; I in my bedroom,
You in your cybercafe
And shared a kiss, warm enough
To melt the heart of the fabled ice queen.

-End-

Some points to note:
This poem is not autobiographical.
Free verse is actually harder to write because there is no fixed structure, whereas with my normal rhyme scheme I merely have to pick from a selection of words which rhyme, and arrange them in a pre-determined order.
I tried to capture the essence of an online relationship: the surreal (fantasy setting, computer graphics, role-playing) interspersed with the real (two people in love). Maybe it is a bad poet who gives away the meaning of his poem, but this is for my future reference too.
For my critics, who must be thinking of what nonsense I am getting up to in my fantasy world, let me reiterate: this poem is NOT autobiographical.

1 Comments:

  • once a writer pens his poem, he gives up sole authorship over its meaning. other people can interpret it however they wish - marxist, femininst, deconstructionist blah blah blah - and that can have little to do with the writer's "original intent".

    anyway, all that blather was supposed to mean: of course it's not autobiographical, jerry, but it could always be miscontrued...

    By Blogger rachel, at 8:08 AM  

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