Thursday 20 December 2012

Declaration - Friday Flash


I stand in your courtroom accused
Arraigned in the dock abused
By a pack of jurisprudent hacks
Non-cognisant of the possibility
Of artistry, denied dead in its tracks
Chiding it unholy blasphemy
Condemning me to years on the rack
Of prison locks and visceral fears
Well I don't recognise your pedantry
Nor your arid linguistic savagery
Your juris-diction is a legal fiction
Plodding plotlines prefiguring the conclusion
Of my inevitable conviction
For being a person of conviction
Forked tongue and serrated diction
Mauling and maiming rids you of me
Constricts my corpus of poetry and simile
Makes you sole practitioners of larceny
Carving simulacra of language so moralistic
Hollow statues and statutes so autistic
They cannot support your glass ceilings
Shrouding our citizens' surging feelings
You bring the Philistine pediment down
Shattering your own bewigged crowns
To support truth one has to be free
You can inject limitless penthanol into me
I still continue to compose verities
As an artist striving for complex sublimities
My rhyme take wing and soars
Beyond the clutches of you prosaic whores
I shall never be coeval with your version
Chockfull of inane and vitiating assertions
Piloting my own dauntless latitude instead
Remaining unbowed inside my head
While you lexigraphic manglers
With strangler's hands around language's windpipe
Bearing along angular longitudinal meanderings
Overlook language's rich shading of meanings
Not just two sides to every story
But a relative veritable potpourri
Of parallax perspectival points of view
Tear up you law codex, start anew
Doubtless you will deny me pen and ink
Intending for me to baste in my own stink
Yet I will utilise my own parings
Collocating couplets from insect husks
Finger stylus to impress the dust
Communing with those others sat here trussed
As they too in the past were confined unjust
Yet established our proud literary tradition
From the inequities in the underbelly of a prison
Sentenced, I will pour out my sentences
Venesect the soul of our people's transcendences
In this shed skin I will quarry veins of feeling
Arm them with verbal ordnance to send our foes reeling
See how they will dance upon your ordinance
Ergo I deny the authority of this court
So I readily permit you to transport
Me to the cells for some welcome solitude
In order to ferment my rhymes brewed
For fomenting an organic uprising from lowly mold
A storming of our own Bastille with me in the hold
Restoring words to their full free expression
Reclaim their regressive compression
From beneath your Judge's hammer
Drumbeat accompaniment into the slammer
Where I will compose a new liberating grammar
To sustain the reverberation of our clamour
I tender this tribunal my tribune declaration
May it engender the rebirth of our nation


Russian punk band Pussy Riot jailed for "Blasphemy" in Russia. This poem is dedicated to them.

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Don't forget to go to My Xmas Pressie for you, which starts today Friday 21st December. With your prompts, I'll write you your own flash story here on my blog.


10 comments:

Helen A. Howell said...

You night be able to confine the man, but you can't confine his creativity.

Interesting piece of writing. The rhyme worked very well and it flowed.

Helen A. Howell said...

Opps night should read might - dang that old keyboard!

Alison Wells said...

Hear hear, Bravo!

Larry Kollar said...

You can jail my body, but not my soul. Nicely done, it kept me reading all the way to the end.

Denise said...

"Your juris-diction is a legal fiction" I like! Too many clever lines to mention!
And to think you told me you couldn't do pomes...

Katherine Hajer said...

Yeah, I'm still trying to figure out how you can go to jail for "blasphemy" in a country that was officially atheist for so many decades. I'm also uncomfortable with the idea that someone could be charged with "blasphemy" of a religion they don't necessarily belong to.

Besides, don't the bishops know what Christianity was like in the early days?

Not to mention Pussy Riot had a point.

I liked how you used rhyme in this, and that wonderful range of vocab you always employ. The metre gives it a rap feel, at least the way I read it.

Cindy Vaskova said...

Loved this!
The voice in my mind was powerful and the rhymes hit hard! As always, wonderful vocabulary, absolute pleasure to read.

Great poem Marc!

Anonymous said...

One of the more interesting flashes I've read recently. Really interesting though, although some of it went over my head, I think!

Steve Green said...

WOW!!! Just F~~~~ng WOW!!!

I guess this is the WIP poem, I am terribly impressed, you always amaze!!

Happy Christmas Marc. :-)

Tim VanSant Writes said...

Maybe their work loses too much in translation, but I think you are far more eloquent than PR.