The Campaign Builder's Guild

"Hamlet, omelet, all that jazz
MacBeth and his unholy spazz"

God, I am still laughing at that.  

Re-reading this thread from start to finish is a rather interesting project for me. I seem to cycle through influences and styles at a rapid pace.

Quote from: Elven DoritosRe-reading this thread from start to finish is a rather interesting project for me. I seem to cycle through influences and styles at a rapid pace.

Cycling is the right word for it.  You don't seem to let yourself or a readfer get too commdfortable, let alone become rut-bound.  It works, but sometimes I think that the art of placing your stuff in the right place juxtaposed with the right other works is an art in itself.

Quote from: TonighttheshowisliveSomething is wrong
I don't feel alive
There are strangers around me
They know me they say
I hold my hand steady
Then they steal my knife
The room, it starts spinning
Take three pills then five
Like, look at these stripes
Like tigers and zebras
They're pouring out from
My magazine pages
The guy with the windows
Surrounding his eyes
Is talking of mushrooms
And rainbow-tipped fingers
Like, feel the room glowing
Smothered in warmth
The pulse of miasma
She pukes on my coat
Who is this person
Staring at me
I look at him closely
I can't seem to see
The mirror is cracked
The towels are growling
I walk to the crowd
And everyone's laughing
Their faces are twisted
This guy, he has trackmarks
Where have I landed
Broken bottles surround me
Recycle your anger
This buzzing infects me
I hear a sound, screaming
Is that an owl, man?
The buzzing gets louder
The clock won't stop ticking
The TV is static
But no one has noticed
Look, I can't stay here
I have to be home
Please STOP that buzzing
I can't fucking think
The knife, someone's playing
A game with his hand
He might lose a finger
But he don't understand
Dumb, you ain't sayin'
Like, my tongue is tied up
It's bound by precision
Just open it up
We're kissing, we're screaming
We're knocking, we're broken
We're hoping, we're humping
And there went the padlock
Something is burning
It might be the couch
This guy just keeps popping
His pills and bugs out
Look at him dancing
On the table, no pants
An upper, a downer
Then a few more perchance
Where the hell am I
And how did I get here
Who are these people
And how do I leave?

Quote from: The Cosmic CarnivalNow, the world is unkind
To the children of storms
When demons have haloes
And angels have horns
I know you can't see me
I know you can't hear
The organ is playing
A song of good cheer
A dirge for the daylight
A dream of the night
They scream for my head, dear
They never shall fight
For causes they know of
For children or friends
The means of destruction
Justify their own ends
The carousel's spinning
The devil has come
The carnival is here
A song has begun

The monkeys dance and play with matchsticks
Breathing fire on your coat
They're dressed in clothing meant for business
Strangling every single note
Careening freely on the third ring
You begin to feel disturbed
Their leader turns and builds a grave stone
Beneath which you are interred

Haven't you heard of the danger of miming
The goals of the clowns who are smiling for you
Haven't you heard of the anger and timing
Required for being the fool just for you
A woman is standing as daggers are swimming
Across the thin air and are cutting her blouse
They stand within this, the rings of perdition
And claim not the company of Gabriel's house

Shadows part and mate again
Copulating in their sin
You know you cannot peer within
The spotlight of the conjoined twin
The air begins to reek with dust
You feel as though you always must
Keep your eyes in hopes of lust
Abusing their unholy trust

Elephants come marching in and take the outer-inner-ring
Medicine and innocence is not within their tusks or ears
Ivory and amnesty are all that these majestic beasts
Seek in silence and in trumpets, now they are so very near
Something happened to the future of these mighty animals
As the water fills their trunks you hear a sound so very clear
The killing angel made of blood taken from a lamb and dove
Has arrived to claim their lives as pain begins to climb and sear

Oh, the ringleader comes into center circle
Touching his face to his bony staff
He cares not if you're trapped within
As long as he can steal your laugh
His face is red and his eyes are black
He swears vengeance on God above
He may not be the Devil himself
But surely he can feel no love

The mighty and fearsome
Tamer of beasts
Is whipping the lion
Bleeding his feet
He handles a chair of
Mahogany
Entranced and ensnared in
Misogyny

Acrobats who spring about the wire from the sky
Are staring down into the crowd with utmost disdain
Asking facts and missing tact they shall never die
Their breath is made for all to see and will always sustain
As chalk made from the bones of sinners and of kings
Is clapped into a deadly cloud of fortune and of woe
Their brother falls onto the floor, suspended by a string
They are puppets dangling from the pits that hang below

And as the crowd begins to cheer
You soon realize
You're all alone within your chair
Panic in your eyes
The Carnival shall carry on
Never to desist
Welcome to the gates of Hell!
Please do not resist.

Normally I don't post revisions, but this is the new version of "The Empty Shell," from Ex Animo, my nearly-finalized collection of poetry.

Quote from: The Empty ShellBeneath the oak trees 'round my tomb,
Inside the Sacred Mother's womb,
Beside the sordid sister's call,
Hallowed by the will of all,
I see the Empty Shell.

Holes of earth and muddled mirth,
Shuttered in embrace of church,
Yards of ash and crimson cowl,
Woven in the midnight howl,
I see the Empty Shell.

Artemis with moonlit bow,
Lovers bloodied in the snow,
Gallant grimace, prying ice,
Clumps of clamor, clinging vice,
I see the Empty Shell.

Leaves across my open grave,
I am the autumn's brilliant slave,
Aristocrat, née Plato's form,
Those that keep the dead so warm,
I am the Empty Shell.

Quote from: The WeddingLittle by little, as ants sneak into the premature breeze,
   twenty of my closest friends stand as though
   complete strangers, trading tales of currency
   hapless, helping their abject egos to pretend
   this strange fog does not wound their soul

The wedding, with delicacy and tattered bliss swaying,
   planned with amnesty and in the daylight
   a conspiracy to ratify celestial bonds
   two souls prematurely stitched in union
   convinced of the eternity of love

Charming, as the bride and her cheery golden face
   swim like sand through crashing crystal ocean
   sinkholes of sympathy into which ambience
   and motorized humility are projected, pried
   amplified by smog-induced hysteria varnish

Reality churns in my ears as I am directed forward
   suited in the armaments of formality
   dripping with emaciated mulishness
   anxiety and social anticipation parading
   in neat lines along the open white square

Banners and bouquets, arranged in pleasing fashion
   magnolias and chrysanthemums and roses
   assorted in shape and color with calculation
   a wedding planner must engage in tyranny
   to pull off such propaganda with efficiency

A marriage is a promise made in anxious allocution
   its covenant entered with uniform amiability
   and, whose failure is attested in courtrooms
   in broken highway unhappiness left crying
   children torn into pieces by hate and spite

But with a passing hand and dawning dreariness
   ringlets crooning at my eyelids, bare
   and tinkering with a ballroom morality
   I sit in reflection of open cerulean blood
   the ozone everything breathes sweetly

Caramel honor and the sweet afternoon commences
   much investment is interpolated in harmony
   notes of ecstasy waft upon the grass and trees
   insidious smiles of pure intention curl and flash
   and photograph hunger is sated with rapport

Bride, entourage, and fanfare with gap-toothed absolution
   held close in hushed proclamations of the day
   melting into cyanide facetiousness in piteous
   rebellion to the commands of apparitions
   handiness in the half-mad ferocity of future

The groom, no hint of gloomy predestination or prayer
   stands admirably in dress uniform preparation
   as always expecting rain or war on barricades
   and as the barracudas circle around him
   he merely tips his quarantine hat with humor

Fidgeting with brass and abolitionist languor
   lying lurid in the fields of Elysium
   torpor and tepidity filling viscous souls
   temerity rising in crescendo naivety
   limpid in its own impressionable way

Navigating Phlegethon with pallid sanctimony
   in tears from temporal discharge and
   clutching perdition in telling manner
   establishment swallows these two
   expatriated by orphic prophecy

Appropriated by corruptive nascent hallelujah
   expressed in token jubilation remarking
   collars of acceptance, crowned in alacrity
   supernova swindlers with soaring chaos
   giddiness bursting in my daydream soul

The formatting on this would look nicer if I could indent.

Quote from: obviateYou could fit her world
   into a petri dish
   annotated hubris
   a pair of red boots

I could taste equations
   tranquil heresy
   apocalyptic hunger
   a flooded river delta

Sun-soaked, eradicate the danger
   running grooves in harmony
   skipping pops of record high
   assuaging guilty grave robbers

Dental miscommunication burgeons
   hankering on the quasar
   touching dimes to damsels
   sudden sparks of serenity

I like the new version of the 'Empty Shell'  Pace is fantastic, and very intrinsically understood.

[/size]
The night began with half-note arrangements, dusty boots slamming the accelerator as a cloud of history and corruption blew into the wind behind me. I, Louis Delacroix, was on a wild-eyed journey in the way only the French can be; a canopy above my head and a brown ruddy road quaking beneath my greedy tire. Frenzied, I brushed my hair aside as I held my phone close, shouting in ecstatic acquiescence as the voice, dearest Cameron, friend of the House of West, scurried in his shuttered half-squealed way, his HA-RA-RUMPHING and mad hatter sermons cutting through the dreary rain of an uncommonly cold summer afternoon

I arrived at Cameron West's temporary home, the residence of an ex-girlfriend whose soul ruptured after their sporadic bouts of romance came to a grinding halt. A wide-grinned Cameron returned with surrender in his eyes and a warrant stitched into his soul, but we renegades, raconteurs of the forgotten questions of eternal happiness, climbed into my jalopy and crashed along the open dusty back road, the kind that has a number for a name

Two thousand years of tyranny flooded the veins of Cameron, but he held a cheery form of pandemonium in his pocketbook, whooping out into the uncaring dead day, where the sun refused to be uncontained by its curly blankets of iron admonition. But we persisted, pressing into the mad storm clouds as though they were salvation, as though we could hold them to ourselves and coo to them in the night, the sort of unremarkable infatuation that men and boys are so frequently infected with. But I did not lust for carnal emptiness, I wanted the sky to crack and the wisdom of Sophia to embrace me, as I would melt inside of her with fervor and completion

We stopped into a bookstore, a dingy old place with knowledge stacked in hundreds of rows, happy little books cascading along each other, jutting and demanding a new home. This orphanage was closing soon, screaming babes crying out for help, and Cameron laughed in his half-mad way as he trudged along, picking and slicing three books from ancient-looking shelves. I could not see his wildly shifting collection, jabbing at a shelf as he plucked a book, smirked and mumbled three words from it, then buried it among the other forgotten treasures others had passed along. I pored and searched and believed in Heaven at that moment, needing to feel alive and feeling a sudden shock along my spine as I wondered, could this be my one true love? could this book enlighten my soul, enrapture me to higher callings? And breathless, I stumbled into the poet's corner, snatching with greed Ginsberg, Whitman, Frost, and others, too many to count, too many to care. Enthrallment, encapsulating my soul, eternally bound within a hardback cover

We made a pact to gather the other members of our band, trudging along the black asphalt hopefulness of the city so that we could knock upon the window of Dante Page. We climbed along the sideways half-warped deck behind his house, and when certain that there was no need for privacy or indecency, we rapped along his window, as we were accustomed to doing. Mere moments passed before Dante, with open arms and that look of confirmation that dwells within the hearts of the righteous and courageous, took us into his home, greeting us as though we were soldiers returning from some forgotten, ancient war. He exchanged words with Aurora, the warm-hearted exuberance that filled his steely blue eyes with the conviction that compels his every atom into the assured grasp of knowing salvation, and the plan was set into motion

We climbed into the jalopy again as both Cameron and Dante made calls, simultaneous summons issued to our other companions, to complete our hysterical fraternal rite. Arranging to meet at a sterling bar of ultimate and unconquerable tranquility, we found our respite as we crawled through the swinging-swaying doors, an infectious brilliance in our souls and the trumpets of Dante's thousand choirs of angels thundering behind us, reminding the world of the divinity found in fellowship and piety

The next to arrive, swiveling in a begrudgingly conciliatory way, was Dean Skeller, the goggled two-eyed captain of knowledge who exudes the sense and mindfulness that  encircles us in a ring of indigo, transforming our humble society and elevating us to reach Sophia's waiting hand. Dean was nearly silent, attesting only in glimpses of confession that his soul was, like all mortals, wounded by the clawing demons that condemn us to a life of pain, but all the same he celebrated life with us, embracing Sophia's reminder that to be alive was to be supreme

We began to speak of women, with Dean in his quiet manner reminding us that we should all be thankful for our past, his own conspired and muddled in the tasteless spirals that left him in a humbled and hat-tipping mood. Cameron then spoke in disjointed, many-minded way, grasping at a hundred thoughts and spraying them, a machine gun of a million bits of cosmic fluorescence sparkling along the dim rivets of the somber table we seized and painted in our vibrant way

"Tomorrow never sees me as I saw myself in yesterday's clothes,"  he said with a hoot and a slap on the table, humming three notes of a song that waivered into our conversation like a crow that perches on an open windowsill. "From here on out, my God, we're all together, we're in this place, tonight is our night to seize Life and remind her that we can feel, that we are here, that everything and everyone is just another marker on our unmapped road trip across her open thighs," he laughed again and hooted and hollered as drinks were set before us, smiling slyly at the young waitress, who winked and carried on with her duties, melting into the darkness of the bar again

"I don't believe in love," said I, already feeling the first of several drinks course through my veins, faint as I was in the hours we had journeyed out. "It's a vulgar word," I explained to confused stares, "I can't be a part of it, it makes a pure intention seem like some dirty, normal convenience, an expression or phrase that everyone steals and paints on their door, six billion red doors all the same, I want more than a red door, a simple cage to put myself in, a single dream to pursue"

"Has he been drinking already?" crooned Corey Madden, the cherub-faced angel who won the admiration of all the women he happened by, though he connected with another soul, wrapping his angelic wings around her, the two of them inseparable in that newfound joyous way of lovers. "Give me what he's having," he laughed, and Cameron whooped and clapped him on the back, beaming at the completion of our covenant

"No, no, let me explain," I said, smirking with resignation as my fellows clapped and chortled. "I seek something unexplainable, something beyond words, like... I want to find a woman for whom I could pry the stars like jewels, give them to her, and be unafraid of the wraiths of galaxies or the Keeper of the Stars and all the repercussions for such an act of pure and complete gesture of gratitude... I wish for someone for whom I could sew together a million words of adoration, all in earnest dedication, and still feel unconvinced that I had said enough of her glory and her awesome, soaring notes that resonate within the fabric of my very being, rippling and waving through me as I stood with complete adoration of her temporal, cosmic, and eternal form, leathery and incorruptible, mortal and immortal, as in love with life as all of us, a raison d'être, a refuge for renegades, a home for beggars, a warm wisdom I can enter and erupt with joy and comfort and surrender--"

"Sounds like you're talking about getting laid," Cameron howled, earning the laughter and admiration of us all, for we envied Cameron for his free spirit and his ever-growing grin and especially for his frenzied swath of emotion, that maelstrom, that symphony of enclosure, a complete yet sprawling image of himself that spilled into the lives of others, inviting us to exist in the private world where everyone was damned and yet they wore unpainted smiles

My God, the night, in its half-bound glory, bleeding into the moonlight, with chaos and angels and all the grimace that comes with too much to drink and the brilliant white-hot light of purest joy that infected every soul we came across, even as our numbers began to dwindle; first Dante, who revered the dawn and God's promises and held his oaths to be sacrosanct, walking into his home in a half-drunk state that we comforted, talking him out of further madness and knowing that when he promised to stay home and never drive, he would uphold his word, for his word was law and Dante was incapable of breaking testament or Law, and then when bespectacled Dean Skeller screamed in his silent way into the night, sober as he was known to be and without the dreams of canopies and mad-god star thievery that plagued my aching soul, and then when Corey was driven around the town in hopes of clearing his mind, finally coming to his senses around some neon sign begging for a gambler and a jack of hearts, yes it was then that we took Corey back into his truck, whooping and cavorting in the way that the dwindling armies do when their numbers vanish in the frenetic moments of pitched battle

Cameron and I slid into a gleaming red and black club where women debase themselves, sitting in the back and discussing his mad ways and impossible plans as though recalled from some fallen civilization, a dream that broke into a million pieces after being clawed and mauled by inanimate Siberian tigers, until we were expelled from this Hellish reminder of the lowest needs of mortal flesh for refusing to even buy two drinks, which was required in lieu of paying cover, but I wished to keep my senses and what remained of my wallet so we hurried back to the House where Cameron West now dwelled, and we said our cheery goodbyes

And as I droned through orange construction cones and peered at the nearly full countenance of the lunar avatar of what is surely Sophia's most blessed form, one miraculous thought burned and trembled in my ears and crashed through my veins:

"Yes, life is truly splendid in all its searing glory"

Also, a character list for the tale above
Corey Madden: cherub, the elder angel
Dean Skeller: bespectacled agent of eternal truth
Louis Delacroix: maddened poet and loveless magician
Dante Page: squire of God's holy will
Cameron West: the harbinger of gleeful chaos

[/color][/size]
"Tell me about Delilah."

It was the first time Dean Skeller had dared to utter her name, his two pensive eyes groaning for resolution and the exploration of Truth and all its bounties, and so, recalling the half-smirk absurdity of Cameron and mustering my best mask of unhurt and ambivalence, I cradled the surly glass of rum and pondered

"She was a love," I said, growling each word, punctuating with swigs of cold anxiety and a shot of self-realization, "a vulgar little love that died as all shallow things must do. Flowers on a tomb, a fading comet, a brilliant bursting lightbulb, death and all its splendor, Delilah was life, she was everything, she was nothing, she was the Void, she was not Sophia and for that I both hated her and loved her, for to love is to hate and confine and need and cling and unfulfill and regard, rather than redefine"

He pressed a glass against those spinning grey eyes, steel in the face of stainless obscenity, mindfulness in the mindless humming of asinine guitar, strumming infinity and purchasing rounds of abstinence for all the sane and sober minds seeking completion in a midnight dreary dalliance, and then Dean said, "So you never knew her, and instead of exploring her, sharing your nova madness that you continually huff about, you abandoned her on a city block and left her with a rainy glass of teardrop sadness?"

I sunk in shame, recounting on my mental abacus the crimes committed against Delilah and against myself, and knew that in his goldminer way Dean sought to purge me of my sins, directing me to wisdom and peeling away my pavement self delusion, and so I pondered and slithered and considered the power of the Fates and all the impossibility of romance and the shocking truth of the capitalist notions of investment that plagued the hearts of lovers and the poorly minded, and I knew then what I must say. "I never knew her and never opened my sanctum heartbreak to her because I needed her to feel secure, she was empty and I tried to fill her with my knowledge, I tried to burn necessity into her consciousness and elevate her to a throne, a divine seat of will and thought and prowess fortune coronation regality elegance profession. . ."

He snickered, the way that Lucifer must have snickered, that knowing deception that had led to the Truth, the waiting serpent fangs that promised good and evil, that defined the Paradise that only through ignorance and the blind acceptance of God's word could man retain his immortal spirit and remained saved and unsullied by the flames of sin that burden every waking soul and demand for salvation through the intervention of flesh and immortal christening, he snickered as such and said, "I think you wanted to see yourself within her, turn her and polish her into a mirror, and when she wouldn't taste of your cigarette, when she wouldn't smell of your sweat, when she would not think of your volition and wake at your demand, I think you realized that you are a martinet, you want a puppet, you need formless uncreation rather than a sculpted wonder"

"Perhaps," I lit a dreary half-cigarette and smoldered with anxiety, knowing that I had been branded with unfortunate half-truth and would have to use a sieve to sort knowledge from the grit and sand that stuck to my subconscious like black tar, and I smoked and listened to myself and the rhythms of the night and the sound of glasses clinking against an open bar and wondered if I had not gone completely mad for and from Delilah all those months ago

[/color][/size]
And so it was that Dante Page found himself alone within the blinding light that filtered through the prison bars of ruined romance, crestfallen and trapped in a city after the End of Days and left by God to oversee the ruinous singularity that had catapulted his misery to the point of missing Rapture, and he stood and knew Aurora had left, but not that he had Known her, for she had in her final clandestine days been cruel and unwise and swallowed whole the incapability of mindful expansion or the resuscitated need for individuality and self-expression that can, in all the words of the Divine and in the scripts of the ancients and left humming and rumbling on the tongues of the wisest priests, the children of the stars and the happy prophets who fill the sky with meaning, yes this and this only can be described in a single word that glows and coalesces and burns with fervor in the hearts of those who refuse to be snuffed and allow the soft glow of candlelight not to confuse them from knowing the meaning of the sun, solar wonder and the vast truth of reality and the stations of the cross and all the relevant elevation that takes and wraps the mind into supreme consciousness: magic

 Corruption of the spirit is the most grievous crime to which Aurora had been convicted, but her smoking tongue and lashing bouts of closing, that is the act of emptying the mind of sinfulness and filling it with books and pages and quotes and references to build a paper fortress and claim faith and longevity and embrace of the one real truth to the exclusion of rhythm-truth that rattles in the ears of every soul that is in tune with the frequency of life, screaming and kicking and dancing naked on the streets as it is known to be, brick-layered grime covering the faces of children who Know that infinity is a concept and concepts are limiting and to memorize one's life is to unlive it and kill yourself in ritual suicide more hateful to the well-being of one's spirit than the destruction of one's life-wish, the acolytes and parsons and the abbots all hold a hymn of hallelujahs to the undying and unspoken creed that can only come after their uttered counterparts die in echo, underneath when all vibrations have rendered themselves empty, proven their unworthiness and the need for further expression and attainability and precious visions born from fleeting images that connect the mind to Sophia and her waiting grasp as God's only messenger in the instances when Void and uneternal paradox demons can no longer claw at what you have known and are pierced with searing spears of Knowledge which the Creator so knowingly put into Eden with secret omniscient all-Knowledge that serpents and Dean Skeller could pry the truth from the human condition and necessitate his untimely expulsion

So consider then the sin of man, which is not to be curious but to be led by woman, as Genesis would tell us, to great acts of unwisdom, to scorn the hand of Sophia, but this, as the serpent would have us to believe, is because of woman's own weakness to the call of corruption and that the entire adolescence of the human spirit required morals and guidance, but the tongues and fruits and trees are all inverted and the messages are corrupted by immortal anti-understanding that now prevents Aurora from grasping the Knowledge that Sophia provided her, and thus prevent her from elevating Dante to the quaver of her eternity, as the two souls become cast in gold and feel the calves and idols begin to melt and know and Know and un-Know that if they come untangled, they will succumb to the Biblical narrative and find themselves cast in roles not meant for them or for any who Believe, for their belief is now a venom that is poisoning salvation and demands tribute instead of elevation

I do not Believe, I look into the Void and see Cameron's smirking chaos and I hear madness screaming at the New Orleans floodgates and know that anything that I do and anything that I say cannot unmake the faults and earthquake nightmares that plague the immortal spirit of Dante and I begin to cry, not tears of salt or tongues of flame but for the Holy Spirit, for ghosts and gods and everything that never was and could never be for that is the only iron link that has not rusted in this accumulating belt of madness and Mars and war and death and sadness that will tear life asunder if permitted to grow in its storm cloud way

and a poem to break up the prose series

Quote from: also known as HelloPlagiarist amphetamine
half-spirit inundation
of loneliness in the
form of greeting

Is this thread just for your poetry, ED, or can anyone join in?  (It's quite all right if it's exclusive, mind, I'm just curious.)