Putrefy

Caustic, callous, contemptuous,

Strip the life away from us,

Burning, braising, boiling,

All the smiles are searing,

Rot and rend and roast,

Ripping life away.

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Ooookay, so, that was morbid...

Yeah, I just wrote that then. The alliteration in every second line draws emphasis to the harshness and meaning of each word. "Caustic, callous, contemptuous" are all harsh words with strongly negative meanings. Caustic, acidly harsh, cutting. Callous, harsh, unfeeling. Contemptuous, hateful, distasteful. "Burning, braising, boiling" all methods of cooking, involving extreme heat. burning carries the connotation of fire. Boiling and braising with cooking flesh. This is quite graphic and carries a lot of imagery. "Rot and rend and roast" all have strong images attached as well. Rot is the breakdown of flesh, a sickening, stinky process. To rend something/someone is to tear them apart, gut them, totally annihilate them. Roast is another method of cooking that connotates with cooking flesh. The other lines speak of stripping away life, killing smiles, and, by connotation, happines. I'm not entirely certain what I was thinking of when I wrote this, but after typing it up, the unknown thing that has been gnawing at me and making me feel rather depressed faded, so I'm assuming it's whatever that is.

Lemme know what you think of my little ode to morbidity.

One And All

This is a poem that my friend claims to be her favourite of my works. It is not my personal favourite-- how could I possibly chose? Nonetheless, it is one that I'm content with.

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One And All

I am the fighter,

The artist,

The thinker,

I am the scholar,

And I am the dreamer.

I am the cure,

And I am the cancer,

The healer,

And necromancer.

I am the sun,

And I am the moon,

Dead leaves,

And the bloom.

I am the demon,

Bathed in light,

And the angel,

Consumed by night.

I am one,

And I am all,

I cannot rise,

And will not fall.

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I wrote One And All one day during a maths class. This was a few months ago. To summarise, the poem is about the fact that humanity, and people cannot be defined by a single label. A doctor isn't just a doctor. There's more to an emo than black dye, straight razors, eyeliner and tears. This is outlined in the first stanza. The repetition of the phrase "I am" is used to attract attention to the multiple labels which define the speaker. The concept is then narrowed down to good and evil, positive and negative. Stanzas 2-4 are comprised of contrasting images. A healer is seen as positive, one who cures ailment. A necromancer, seen as negative, is a magician who manipulates the souls of the dead to their will. THe fact that the speaker is claiming to be both symbolises the 'yin and yang' within oneself. No human is purely good or purely evil. A person cannot be purely good, completely flawless and uncorrupted. Just as a person would cease to exist; kill themselves if that had not an ounce of good within their souls. These stanzas outline the balance of nature within individuals and the world itself. The final stanza speaks of the constant, in vain struggle for success and power, as well as the tenacity to prevent oneself from failing. It also addresses the current state of the world; the war in Iraq. Nobody is, by a great deal, winning, and the war has no foreseeable end. That said, neither side is yeilding. The final stanza describes the element of human nature, that last, desperate instinct, that prevents us from giving up, and the struggle to be more than we can be. To be superhuman.

One And All is simply my interpretation of human nature. The opinion of a young, naiive adolescent, non-religious female in modern Western society.