When does so much become so little? Believing it’s always your turn
Your debt to yourself is catching up
Your life is empty (as such)
Left with no thing:
Just sand slipping through your fingers
Tell me When does too little become too much?
This quadrille is a reworking of my poem Taking Stock, a cascading poem itself based on the lyrics (italicised) from the Nomeansno song Stocktaking. Shared with dVerse Quadrille #231 – much
You stop crying and they call you strong. The dead assemble to mourn your breathing. A new hell found to which you don’t belong: Four walls surround without any way of leaving.
You stop asking and they call it growth, Answers never satisfied with real meaning. Every new facade demands an oath As a reward to calm the screaming.
You stop speaking and they call it peace, Yet their ever-present chatter remains. New, fresh faces mean they will never cease To encircle you with their hurricanes.
They don’t want you whole, Best conquered and divided; They want you manageable In the maze they have provided; And that starts with getting quiet.
This is inspired by and uses text from the author’s note of Shain’s post Quiet Enough To Keep
Let my AI talk to your AI while we rest and sleep; my artificial assistant became my therapist; I no longer know of what appointments I need to keep, but have the answer to anything at my fingertips.
They’re suggesting that there are other things out there, but that’s a scary thing, our AIs all can agree; I can see it all from here without a worry or care and leave my AI alone to do everything for me.
Solidified as a clogged pipe, with a hunger never sated; stubborn, with a fistful of lies, illegal to be debated; The wrong colour or wrong type, in murder, congratulated; to blacken perfectly clear skies far from where you are located;
Populations submit to hype or kept pleasantly sedated; it’s them or us, all broken ties, arguing until frustrated; So the timing has become ripe, in the fervour you’ve created; it really comes as no surprise that you’ve become the most hated.
My bedroom, dusty and rank with teenage anger, Putting the world to rights through a cracked speaker’s static; a chorus of voices chanting in my lonely imagination, the army I lead from a mattress on the floor.
A spinning refrain, played again and again “Here you stand, my judge and jury.”
A dead mouse, a decaying spider plant, the only witnesses to these carpet-muffled pleas. We stood together, a council of the defeated, alienated.
Jaded even before the fight; “In gods they trust to hide the sins which they commit themselves.”
Sullen and restless we’ll decompose our withered leaves, settle into the dirty corners anonymous not forgotten
“We’re legion.”
Written well after the fact for the GloProWriMo Day Sixteen prompt: try writing a poem that imposes a particular song on a place. Describe the interaction between the place and the music using references to a plant and, if possible, incorporate a quotation – bonus points for using a piece of everyday, overheard language.
As an angsty teenager, awkwardly looking at the constant depravity of the world, I latched on to anthems that united me with others, even if only in bedrooms across Britain. One such song that resonated with me was Theatre of Hate’s Legion, which I had bought (saving mum’s lunch money) on a 7″. My old dodgy record player had a method of allowing repeat plays of the record on the turntable, and so it was that one day I played this song 59 times in a row. I’m not sure why I never got to 60. My dirty, dusty bedroom housed myself, a tragic spider plant and a mouse that soon suffocated among all the incense smoke used to cover up the smell of cigarette smoke. It was a typically pathetic teenager’s bedroom. But I was convinced I was not alone and I was convinced that I was right.
1994ever 