Blank Verse

A long time ago when I was a different life form, possibly alien, which is to say a teenager, I used the following line in a poem I wrote down in a spiral notebook (lost, I'm sad to say) that I carried around from class to class: 'I have bent for pain that strikes the match.' It's not a very good line, really, but I loved it at the time because it sounded so, you know, poetic for reasons I didn't understand at the time. This happened a lot back then, lines of poetry in the poems I wrote that I liked so much because they just sounded like poetry, more so than the other ones. I really should have been paying more attention when we did Shakespeare, you know?

Because it was no accident. Those lines that sounded so much like poetry were lines of iambic pentameter. So is the line I quoted above, although it uses what's known as a headless iamb. There's some part of me, deep inside, that loves the feel of iambic pentameter, especially the non-rhyming kind that we call blank verse. It's like the ultimate poetic form for me. It has the freedom of free verse combined with the inherent surface tension of metrical form. I love it. Seriously that shit is just so much fun to write.

Here lately I'm finding this form almost impossible to stay away from. That's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm in good company that way, you know: Longfellow, Shakespeare and, a personal favorite, Robert motherfucking Frost. It's the Kratos thing that's got me scratching my head. I guess it's just a fun subject to write about, a great way to practice my favorite form.

So anyway here we have it, a few more lines of blank verse chronicling the adventures of Kratos to go with yesterday's that, for lack of anything better to do with, I'm posting here. I'm interested to see how far this project goes. I'm not sure what else to say about it, so I'll just paraphrase William Shatner who, after parachuting into a crowd of wild fans, said something like: "Man, I love this shit!" After all, this isn't some mamby pamby love poetry that makes you wanna vomit alphabet soup and compose a suicide note with the noodles. This is man poetry, with blood and gore and monsters and stuff that blows up. In blank verse no less. This, my friends, is poetry that goes boom, and if I had the ability to quit my job right now, writing stuff like this is probably what I would spend my time doing - every day and all day long, not giving a shit if anyone read it or not, not caring what people thought about it. Then again I'd stand a better chance of actually murdering a god. So it goes.

- Jon-Paul Smith

- January 9, 2011

Hear the tale of Kratos, arm of Ares,

Kratos, tall of stature, broad of build,

ghostly grey and tattooed with the warpaint

of a Spartan warrior. Unforgiving,

bold and grim, he wields the Blades of Chaos

grafted to his skin in gyves that wrap

around the fleshy meat of his great forearms.

No man or beast survives the bloody spray

of blades forged in the depths of Hades foul.

The bodies of the murdered number legion

where the path of Kratos stains the land.

This is the bloody instrument of murder

the gods of Mount Olympus choose to wield

when they impose their will upon the world,

for Kratos is the object of a vision

darkly foul and utilitarian.

- January 9, 2011