Three Lipograms and Three Compositions

Hello friends,

Three lipograms this week. Enjoy! (And if you do, please consider supporting my work by purchasing either my omnibus edition Knit Ink (and Other Poems) or my new chapbook, Return of… the Robots of Babylon.)

Alternatively, purchase my new EP, Blonder, which was released on Saturday. Blonder presents three experiments in guitar tone, written for electric guitars, bass guitar, and drum machine. The first composition explores delay effects and features a single, unaccompanied guitar performance. You can listen to the whole thing here:

Now some lipograms…

DISHARMONY (Lipogram*)

Disharmony
rains hard diamond shards
on a marshy moor.

Disharmony ordains armadas,
arms assassins,
adds disarray.

Disharmony
rooms Roman dramas
in sordid dioramas.

Disharmony
is harmony
in a mirror.

(*uses only d, i, s, h, a, r, m, o, n, & y)

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DAYS (Lipograms*)

Monday may doom my mood.
Tuesday’s steady duty tests us.
Wednesday dawns and sends a yawn.
Thursday’s truth thus hurts.
Friday air a far affair,
Saturday’s as stray as dust — as rusty.
Sunday’s sad.

(*each line uses only the letters of its day of the week)

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Finally, this poem, a word-unit lipogram, rewrites Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, reducing the original’s 18 stanzas to three, while using only words present in Poe’s poem:

THE RAVEN

Shadows in the lamp-light beating,
all the ghosts within repeating,
doubting, dreaming rare and radiant books of ancient lore...
when, as though to name my sorrow,
faintly, gently you came rapping,
and so aptly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door.
Let my words be nothing, maiden ever rapping at my soul,
               but my darkness evermore.
 
Marvelled, I had flung the fancy,
when the chamber murmured ghastly,
and in stepped a stately fowl of melancholy black.
Caught by some ungainly flutter,
stronger, now, I sought to utter —
till I more than merely muttered distant burdens back
to the silence of the chamber and the bird above my door.
               And we both said, “Nevermore!”
 
Fiery angel, never flitting,
still there sitting, still there sitting,
sculptured eyes now ever at my pallid chamber door....
Demon of the sainted maiden,
horrors bleak in whispered dreaming,
dreary embers of thy shadow clasp my lonely soul
in the feathers of a raven. And my form, from out that midnight,
               shall be lifted nevermore.