"quadruped" poems
Losing a tail
Is like losing a rudder
Like losing a ballast
Stability must be found elsewhere
As a quadruped there are four points of contact
A biped has only two
How do we replace that stability?
With aspiration
~ Extinct ~
**** erectus*
and
**** neanderthalensis*
~ Extant ~
Hominids
Great Apes
Primarily lumbering along on all fours
Quadrupedal
Except Us
**** sapiens*
What mechanism allowed for bipeds?
Natural selection?
Or a naturally selected collective vision
Through collective perspiration
Art is used to mine dream-time
Inspiring the masons among us
The art is the plan
The architecture is built upon
And the builders perspiration
Leads to the built environment
How do you cap it?
Egyptians used a capstone
Aspiration
Leading to
Inspiration
Leading to
Perspiration
Leading to
A
Spire
Naturally
Oct 24, 2014
Oct 24, 2014 at 3:58 AM UTC
The Great Debate started,
Parliament was the open forest,
electors were divided into two groups—
Sir Fox's, and
The Lion's,
The first group wanted to overthrow the Lion
from the sovereign head of the forest,
It was a tough job to confront Lion directly,
So, Sir Fox, appointed a Monkey as the Chief campaigner,
and that monkey appointed other monkeys in the business,
Scaring them with a story of vanishing trees, and living on
the land increases the mortality rate if Lion Party continues.
Monkey, the chief campaigner exclaimed,
“We are not living in the rule of law but in the rule of Lion,
All are equal, but the continuous target of a particular community,
Like a beautiful deer, by another community in majority
should be banned, Deers bring historic and aesthetic
significance to the forest
And need to be treated as the same,”
Deers bellowed gleefully hearing this.
Cows felt hurt,
their exclusion from Monkey’s speech
proved to be a setback to the Fox’s Party,
Cows were the most targeted community
by the Carnivores, everyone in the forest knew,
Potential voters were lost to Lion’s Party.
Polarising speeches of Chief continued,
It brought Rhinoceros to its side,
Seeing rhino in political rallies,
Hippopotamus chipped in,
To counter the increasing weight
Political advisor of Lion, i.e, Tiger,
persuaded Elephant to become an official
member of their party.
Hate speeches increased in numbers
Giraffe, the bearer and upholder of law,
Overlooked everything,
the long neck looked tilted towards
an ideology.
Rumours became truth,
truth became rumour
Monkey was good in it,
And an army of monkeys were excellent.
Parrots, Pigeons, Peacock,
**** Cuckoo, Cat,
Loved the importance they got,
Disseminated the Fox loving songs.
The listeners felt threatened,
They had an enemy living between them
and they were considering them friends,
They thanked the Parrot, Pigeon, Peacock
for pointing them out.
Now, biped hated quadruped,
Quadruped hated reptiles,
Reptiles did the same to amphibians,
And in this way the whole animal kingdom
danced in chaos,
The fiery speeches of Sir Fox helped
in creating illusion,
The slogan of the Man as a common enemy
was changed to, Feline as a common enemy,
Felines joined Sir Fox’s Party,
And Canines ran to Lion’s Party,
Obvious was difficult to observe
Obscure was easy to see.
to be continued
Oct 23, 2021
Oct 23, 2021 at 3:22 PM UTC
Perhaps in some ancient Greek
philosophers' dream
we danced quadruped
clumsy and complete
interlocking narcissism
as celestial bodies skirt
the curvature of the earth
In some drag queen Diva's dream
Jan 24, 2015
Jan 24, 2015 at 11:07 AM UTC
When bed is a tomb,
and blankets are bricks,
and sunlight will burn,
but darkness won't fix
the absence of bloom.
My stomach does churn,
wide awake and still
eyes seeking a friend
to aid gaps and till--
Spores fraid to be ferns.
My aid apprehends--
His footsteps like breath--
The spirits who haunt,
puffing out his chest,
blows a mighty gale.
I had lain there fraught,
eyes shut in great fear,
til torments abate
and my hero near'd--
wreathed in my detente.
His walk, a great gait!
Air of triumph coasts.
A great quadruped,
eyes queerly his host,
I must stare and wait.
His hair, toe to head,
Ubiquitous coat!
Fur shines with a gleam,
his body the moat--
curls to my cold dread.
His presence, serene!
Utters not a word.
Cast demons repel
back into cold earth--
My mind is wiped clean.
And so it befell:
Silence of great sympathies.
Jan 21, 2016
Jan 21, 2016 at 2:01 PM UTC
What odd creatures we be
in binary we breathe
these two feet
a lifetime of skinned knees
propped up
suspended
beneath eternities
a rhythm alternating heaviness
upon such a wild sphere
we danced like infants
when we danced together
we danced the moon
we danced quadruped
this heart at times plural
often lost
we carry always
a contained ocean
a single fragment
a measure of the sudden and the certain
a rhythm alternating heaviness
we wander
we heard
we learn extended
we fall restless
the universe and knowing it
we are made up of everything
and we are incomplete
ever beholding the beginning
ever beholden the end
everyone belonging
the choice
and the inconsequential
in between
the road and the alone
the time we make home
a rhythm alternating infinities
and I dance incomplete
for your eyes and your feet
missing your breath while I breathe
my heavier pulse
my bent light
and our ocean sleeps
in streets
in the puddles of a weeping sky breaking concrete
Apr 27, 2015
Apr 27, 2015 at 5:24 AM UTC
Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature,
An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature;
Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses
Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.
I find myself intrigued by your subvocal oscillations,
A singular development of cat communications
That obviates your basic hedonistic predilection
For a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection.
A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents;
You would not be so agile if you lacked its counterbalance.
And when not being utilized to aid in locomotion,
It often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion.
O Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display
Connote a fairly well-developed cognitive array.
And though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend,
I nonetheless consider you a true and valued friend.
-Data
Jul 9, 2014
Jul 9, 2014 at 8:02 AM UTC
Absolutely astonishing (and amusing) is the aftermath of this
Bonanza, beyond baptism. Blackened, broken and bleeding,
Corpses collapsed copiously, carelessly
Disrespected down to the depths of their deaths, now dreaming,
Enticed, ever in eternity.
Funny is this funeral of fibs fabricated from unfaithfulness.
Ghosts gaining the Grave's grand greeting,
Happy to hoard the
Infested, incommensurable, inacceptable,
Jaded and jinxed,
Kind of kin who kept
Lies lingering, leading on their lover.
My mirror mentions memories,
Narratives knitted with needles
Obtaining obsessive obscurity,
Painted with pillars of impurity,
Querried by the quaint quadruped,
Reassured of rest and relinquishment.
Sorry now is the sayer but
Time ticks tactfully.
Ugly is the untruthful, of the utmost unimportance,
Vexed and vulnerable,
Without a widow in the world,
Xenon exemplifying,
Yellow bellied,
Anti-zenith czar.
Dec 23, 2017
Dec 23, 2017 at 1:46 AM UTC
We read that all functionaries in the Moscow Kremlin use typewriters and messengers for in-house communications.
Typewriters cannot be hacked. The cleverest listening devices aboard lurking submarines and in space spy craft can pick up the tap-tap-tap of a typewriter, but cannot interpret an e-tap from a g-tap.
Better still, typewriters break down only every twenty years or so. No typewriter sends you a message that the Microsoft Word lifetime package you bought has no existence, and that you must buy it again, nor does it give you a blue screen because it has no screen at all. A typewriter tells you nothing; you tell the typewriter with the nimbleness of your mind and fingers, and it obeys.
Beyond that, one does not imagine Vladimir Putin passing idle evenings playing Candy Crush. Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia crush, maybe.
A computer, any computer, unlike the manly typewriter, often suffers the Aunt Pittypat vapors and falls into a faint, calling weakly for smelling salts.
Thus the brevity of this column.
Y'r 'umble scrivener has spent much of a beautiful spring day attempting to coax Aunt Pittypat into waking up and doing a little work:
But all Microsoft's horses (I was thinking of another quadruped, but the name is not appropriate for a family newspaper)
And all Microsoft's persons
Could not make Aunt Pittypat anything but worsens. (That's not a real word)
A personal computer is outdated before you get it home from the Godzilla Box Store, and this moribund machine is some four years old. In dog years that is...something; I forget what.
Tomorrow morning I am off to buy the cheapest machine I can find, for personal computers are as disposable as toilet paper.
I will pass another beautiful spring day re-installing programs and apps (because I am good about backing up all my files) and addresses and all the tiny little dragons that speed along its circuits, and by next week should have a brilliant and well-crafted story to tell you.
May your electrons never fail.
-30-
Jun 6, 2019
Jun 6, 2019 at 10:05 PM UTC
i'm bad luck. struck sad and oblate
weary, dedicated to the swearing ground.
chivalric pulp, my pages
don't bind like they used to.
rhyme me sad. adder fluent, sistines
vaunt these heads of mine. but wise
enough to feel these molecules murmer
and mouth the corvid in the wellwater.
annihilated profiles in my coming wake.
i am bad luck and prose. slipped
my shadow, i walk a bare life.
not broken anymore. not here all the way.
don't canter.
never could.
haven't loved. will
of a ghost. hell, i see ancestors
trailing behind me
in a mass of quadruped brutes
black as the day i was born
and sounding a great horn
made of gold and unprophecy,
babblings of a river older than talk.
Jan 10, 2019
Jan 10, 2019 at 11:08 AM UTC
It’s easy to discern the who what where and when
Compared to the divination of why.
Why are we here? Why are we alone?
Why are we tortured with foreknowledge of death?
Stop.
That’s the most important why, perhaps.
For it plucked us from the trees
And set us on course
To make some sense of our shortage of days,
To ****** the brass ring of eternity
If only in the collective memory.
(Let us here pause
And give a moment’s thought
To the countless anonymous
Who sacrificed all their
Fleet-footed hours
And all human joy
For attainment of eternity
In the memory collective
Only to have been
Promptly forgotten
In the first moment of
Posthumous silence.)
But this quest is amoral,
It does not specify
Whether fame or notoriety’s the prize.
This is the apple of Eden
The tree of knowledge.
It is the crux of sentience
(Poor sentience,
robbed by redefinition
of all salience and pride,
Left lying shop-worn and ill-used.)
It’s the fear of time, the root of crime
And our demand for assistance devine.
Are our whole lives a scream of protest
Against the known inevitable?
Can inevitability even be known
Without the benefit of hind legs?
(Why the quadruped bias?
(and what does this have to do with inevitability?)
Any more than four legs would render
‘Hindmost’ as opposed to ‘hind.’
Let us be specific,
Whether or not it’s
Neither here nor there.)
Why can’t we make peace with our fate,
And accede to the eventual silencing of that
Hated, feared, beloved voice within?
What does nothing feel like?
What does nothing sound like?
Who would be there to tell?
Imagine our lives
If foreknowledge of death,
Did not exist.
What would be sustained?
What would be lost?
What would have never become?
(I know that my ask is unreasonable at best,
The bell has already been rung.
But this is my poem and I’ll ask what I will.)
Could you live in such a state
Of innocence edenic?
Of course not; not as you are.
But then, who, what would you need to be?
If innocence were refundable,
What would that voice,
That lives in a certain place
Between your ears
(Would that voice still
be hated, feared, beloved
under the prospective circumstances,
or would it be otherwise?)
Have to say
(Does a voice ‘say,’
Or does it speak
For it’s master?)
When in quietest solitude?
Are you uncomfortable?
Will you turn the page?
Would you prefer to debate
Than to imagine?
Do we know which way the wind blows?
Are there any more weathermen?
Or are we all meteorologists?
Does it matter?
Did it ever?
For those who remain,
Let me welcome you
To the Realm of Poets and Madmen.
A distinction without a difference.
Nov 5, 2018
Nov 5, 2018 at 7:16 AM UTC