Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Andrew Rueter  Mar 2019
Magician
Andrew Rueter Mar 2019
There is dark magic
Here in my attic
A magician’s tactics
Cause pain emphatic

This magician gives me all I can handle
Until one day I’m dismantled
Like a once lit candle
Extinguished by the ice near Ymir
Birthing the Titans I fear
Bringing death here
Morphing me into a rigid wreck
Here in the frigid depths
I wish I left

The violence of violins
Lamenting the vile sin
Conjured by riled kin
Like they’re wild djinn
Can’t be muted
Only diluted
By becoming rooted
In thinking stupid
Avoiding Cupid
To join the putrid

The magician concocts potions
That excuse my emotions
As I forget devotion
For a temporary motion

The magician gives us difficult obstacles
And easily medicated excuses
So people won’t make things optimal
While purpose eludes them

Like Jekyll and Hyde
My hackles I hide
With shackles of pride
Covered in mystic thorns
So my wrists are torn
From the pain adorned
It’s my brain I mourn

The magician erects walls so thick
They separate healers from the sick
With magic bricks
Imbued by the magician’s enchantment
He builds a wall and then expands it
Until those inside become tantric
From the prison wall’s antics

Every time I turn the page
I am given rage
On the magician’s stage
Of the wars we wage
Under a curse of anger
Dehumanizing strangers
To deploy the Army Rangers
Perpetuating harming danger

The magician lies
The magician steals
The magician hides
What is real
Until I feel
The cold steel
The magician wields
Piercing through my electrified body
I guess the magician finally caught me
Claire Bircher Dec 2010
Dear Odin,

My friend, I hope this letter finds you well.  I’m writing to avail myself of your knowledge of the Playing God term project, we all know you aced the final assessment and I’m having major problems.  I would appreciate any advice as I’m not altogether sure where I’ve gone wrong.  

I gave my creation free will but they don’t appear to understand it.  I completed the “Creating Beings In Thine Own Image” portion of the practical but went further than skin and bone, subservient existence.  I wanted to make certain they could control their destiny, that they had no need to look to me.  I thought it important that they be self sufficient, their existence remains finite but they were supposed to embrace the opportunities offered by autonomy.  My son is meant to be assisting me but I haven’t heard from him in two millennia.  His experience with my project was not a favourable one.  An unmitigated disaster if I’m being honest.  

Things have gotten a little better in the last few thousand years, at least they don’t sacrifice their children to me anymore.  Or threaten to, I told you in our previous correspondence of that ****** Abraham and his son Isaac?  What was the man thinking?  He honestly believed he was in some sort of communion with me.  If I had designed my project in any way that allowed me to interfere I would have made it abundantly clear that this man needed help.  The terrible thing is, they lauded the episode as some kind of miracle that I stopped him in time and provided a ram instead (one just happened upon the scene).  More than likely he didn’t fancy the stoning.  He gave me a real headache, that Abraham character.

It’s this thing of miracles that’s the lingering issue.  I’ve tried ignoring them.  I used to listen occasionally, Moses had my ear for while, I didn’t mind him, entertaining sort.  I never act on anything though, never have.  That’s the point of what I wanted to achieve with autonomy.  I infected them with this ‘humanity’ virus early on and it seemed hypothetically possible that Playing God could be more of a social experiment (I called it 'the study of humanities', which I thought rather neat).  However, the miracle thing just won’t go away.  They queue up in droves, even now, begging me to feed starving children, heal fatal injuries, protect them against natural disasters.  They even plead for forgiveness when natural disasters occur, they think it’s some sort of retribution, I mean, it’s just weather.  It happened like that with the flood, I didn’t cause it and I didn’t tell Noah to build a boat.  He was just a clever bloke with a bit of initiative.

Anyway, the real problem is this, because I gave them free will, but they don’t quite grasp that I cannot fix their problems and all that, (don’t even get me started on this idea that they’ll all live happily ever after if they do perish, a real obstacle in managing their own destiny) they have become frighteningly progressive.  They have mastered technology without realising the environmental fallout, harnessed the power of the atom and are increasingly in danger of self annihilation.  If they go and blow themselves up, apart from half the sphere praising me for doing a job that the other half implored me not to do (and vice versa) I will fail this term again and have to start over.  I can’t be held back another term, I’m still struggling after the dinosaur debacle.

Please help!

Yours ever faithfully,

The Alpha.
Posted for critique as I'd prefer to gauge a critical response before posting to the site, not least as I'm not certain if this style of writing goes against site guidelines.
Thanks in advance for any responses, Claire :)
Donall Dempsey Apr 2017
WHAT THE CLOUDS ARE THINKING

"Huggin!"

"Muninn!"

We call our dogs
and they come running

black black
as ravens

faster than thought
and memory.

Excited they tell me
of all the many

smells
they have encountered.

What it like
to just run

for no other purpose
than the running.

They see the world
through smell and speed.

Delight in
just being.

Outrunning the wind.

The sudden scratch
of a bramble across an eye

is a happenstance
that sees me

wearing a black eye patch
with a diamante twinkling.

I see the world better
with my one eye.

The other was too lazy.

"Yeah yeah...it's the world!
So what!"

Lazy eye easily
bored with perceiving.

Looking, but:
not seeing.

The dogs see me
as the reincarnation

of Odin.

The land is lost
in mist and myth.

The mist devouring
a man

with every footstep
the world erased.

Yet, I outpaced it
gazed once again

upon a moon madly
in love with its reflection.

Look up into the sky
the inside of a skull

that once belonged
to the great giant Ymir

whose death
made all life possible.

Odin and Vili and Ve
make soil from his flesh

bones become
mountains

blood becoming seas.

"See the clouds..?"
I tell my little girl

( already far more
ancient than I )

"They were once
Ymir's brains!"

She accepts all this
with great aplomb.

"I wonder..."
she ponders
"I wonder.. . .

what the clouds
are thinking?"
Donall Dempsey Apr 2024
WHAT THE CLOUDS ARE THINKING

"Huggin!"

"Muninn!"

We call our dogs
and they come running

black black
as ravens

faster than thought
and memory.

Excited they tell me
of all the many

smells
they have encountered.

What it is like
to just run

for no other purpose
than the running.

They see the world
through smell and speed.

Delight in
just being.

Outrunning the wind.

The sudden scratch
of a bramble across an eye

is a happenstance
that sees me

wearing a black eye patch
with a diamante twinkling.

I see the world better
with my one eye.

The other was too lazy.

"Yeah yeah...it's the world!
So what!"

Lazy eye easily
bored with perceiving.

Looking, but:
not seeing.

The dogs see me
as the reincarnation

of Odin.

The land is lost
in mist and myth.

The mist devouring
a man

with every footstep
the world erased.

Yet, I outpaced it
gazed once again

upon a moon madly
in love with its reflection.

Look up into the sky
the inside of a skull

that once belonged
to the great giant Ymir

whose death
made all life possible.

Odin and Vili and Ve
make soil from his flesh

bones become
mountains

blood becoming seas.

"See the clouds..?"
I tell my little girl

( already far more
ancient than I )

"They were once
Ymir's brains!"

She accepts all this
with great aplomb.

"I wonder..."
she ponders
"I wonder.. . .

what the clouds
are thinking?"
Micah G  Jan 2020
Odin
Micah G Jan 2020
Yggdrasil-champion
Magic Mead-master
Sovereign seeker of sight

Command the Valkyrie Battalion
Casting triumph and disaster
Great Lord of Asgard on high

Glory, Ymir-slayer
Glory, World-shaper
All powerful till Ragnarok arrives

— The End —