Thanks, Claire_D! :)
Haiku/Senryu / Machine Gunsaku
discarded garbage
floating island of plastic
strange ecosystem
sunken pepsi can
scuttles on little crab feet
into the future
malformed chicken sits
immobile in its steel nest
awaiting its fate
TV cats sing of
corn-meal and meat by-products
pressed into fun shapes
beneath the city
a lake of oil and benzene
closet skeleton
superhumans reign
sorcery and alchemy
blood money and oil
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Zakari39 reviewed Version 2 -
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Very well written set of verses. At once wry and despairing of the mess we’re making of the planet, our throwaway culture and loose morals when it comes to flora and fauna.
I liked especially the reference of oil and money as sorcery and alchemy – as if we’ve become ensnared by it’s power and it’s whisperings of magic.
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Claire_D reviewed Version 2 -
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This gunsaku evokes to my weary eyes a rather wonderful image of the forthcoming apocalypse. Never have I read a more elegant depiction of the end of the human race in the form of this oft-unexplored senryu pile-up.
The first senryu opens the reader up to the initial problem with our eco issues: messy people making a mess of the planet, often finding it acceptable to dump used gut-busting food wrappers onto the streets in the knowledge it won’t come back to bite their son’s son’s son’s son’s son in 2198. Ha! How wrong these fools are! We will feast on their bodies when the Four Horsemen come!
The images are as clear as our doomed future… the inanimate Pepsi can coming to life, the despicable deformation of the humble chicken. A sense of swelling depression, dystopia and desolate permeates the whole machine gunsaku. What a fitting title!
This is a fiendish work of polemical genius, touched by the gnarled claw of Philip K. Dick at his most cheery.
Top marks and God help us all.
Claire_D
ScorpionHunter reviewed Version 2 -
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I don’t know much about this particular form, so I can’t say a whole-lot. That being said, I liked the poem very much. The theme is a real winner! All the individual statements actually form a bit of a story, which, in this form, is a bit of a bonus. It’s nice & neat, free of “clutter”, and is actually fun to read. The only thing I didn’t like was the line “closet skeleton”. It’s a strange non sequitur that does nothing for the poem as a whole.
Ronny1 reviewed Version 2 -
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This conjures a not so future world where the corporate madness we are living through has finally turned the whole of nature into processed toxin and people into genetically modified zombies! The alchemists I presume are the companies and their scientists who mix the chemicals to create this plastic world ’strange eco-system’ I like, perhaps ‘perverse’ eco system would work even better? Nothing else to pick up on.
If the above is the kind of world you were trying to convey you have succeded admirably. Not sure what closet skeletons refers to though?
All in all I really liked this. It makes me want to go and plant a tree!
smitisan reviewed Version 2 -
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Bleak and depressing, yum! Reminds me of Mishima’s Decay of the Angel, that same sense of a once beautiful land polluted. I can’t fault anything here; about all I can do is say what I would have written, to clarify a couple of images. For one, “beneath the city / corpse lake of oil and benzene / rises from its grave.” And in the last “ubermenschen reign / realpolitik alchemy / blood money and oil.” But, hey, that’s just me. The singing cats are great, and such a contrast to the mutilated chicken. Thank you.
jebozid reviewed Version 1 -
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Maybe “TV cats singing”? I don’t like it ending on ‘of’. Of course, then you’ll have lot of fun arranging the next line :)
4th and 5th both have ‘oil’, maybe not repeat it?
And, and this may soun idiotic, but it’s whistling that way in my head: ” skeleton closet”, can’t really explain why :)
“malformed chicken sits
immobile” – hm, could it ‘sit mobile’? Whan you sit you’re bound to be immobile.
Other than that, I really liked it, what the hell here’s a 10, just it affected me so much!
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