Let's Pretend it's April - Nov. 22
Rules: Write a poem for LPiA on the topic or form described. Each poem should appear as a New Reply to this thread. The goal is to, at the end of the month, have written 30 poems for the month of November. (or one, or six, or fifteen) Prompts may be revisited at any time. All members are welcome.
Topic : Write a poem inspired by an Assassin. Form : Any
Line requirements: 8 or more
Feel free to reply with comments or kudos as you wish.
Gradus stepped from Kinbote’s quill, assassin
for a cause his vanity invented.
A dullard zealot of a dire regime*,
not Jack Grey stumbling while Shade bled.
Kinbote, too vain to die by random hand,
sewed Gradus from the lack he could not face.
Wrote a conspiracy no one had planned,
a myth born to burnish deluded grace.
No destiny, no throne, no Zemblan creed,
just Jack Grey’s blind bullet in the dark.
But Kinbote, starving for a plot to lead,
rewrote his phantom monarch as the mark.
Shade's death was senseless: Cold, unvoiced, unheard;
Kinbote stole even that, and made it absurd.
Footnotes:
1: assassin / regime
Persons unfamiliar with Zemblan phonotactics may object to this rhyme. They are invited to consult better scholars. "Assassin" is, of course, from Zemblan "assasin", a court-appointed purifier of destinies. "Regime," although superficially similar to a French word, is more correctly derived from the Zemblan "raszhim", the lawful order of things; lit. “the straightening of the crown.” Both words contain the royal suffix -im/-in, used exclusively for nouns pertaining to the monarch or to painless executions. Thus the rhyme is not merely permissible but mandatory.
This was actually quite a propitious theme, I have been working on a long poem about "Pale Fire" for a while (I wrote a short "summary sonnet" from it for one of the other LPiA threads) and I had a lot of stuff about Gradus that did not make the cut. Plus the footnote joke was too silly for a real poem, but I am not sorry and I would do it again.
The thing about John Wilkes Booth aside from setting a fashion of triple-barrel names for assassins his being derived via his parents from an English sort-of populist long-jawed John Wilkes was that he headed a real conspiracy you know, Surratt, Powell, that lot and did the job himself.
Such cannot be said of more recent assassins and wannabes who tend to be either cat’s-paws of conspiracies so high and nebulous as to be near-ineffable or obvious randos Squeaky’s Manson ties can scarcely count as a cabal.
So Booth set an anti-example to be avoided, in particular, due to his being shot soon after and his co-conspirators discovered almost instantly suffering that long assisted drop on a short rope before Summer was out.
The thing about John Wilkes Booth aside from setting a fashion of triple-barrel names for assassins his being derived via his parents from an English sort-of populist long-jawed John Wilkes was that he headed a real conspiracy you know, Surratt, Powell, that lot and did the job himself.
Such cannot be said of more recent assassins and wannabes who tend to be either cat’s-paws of conspiracies so high and nebulous as to be near-ineffable or obvious randos Squeaky’s Manson ties can scarcely count as a cabal.
So Booth set an anti-example to be avoided, in particular, due to his being shot soon after and his co-conspirators discovered almost instantly suffering that long assisted drop on a short rope before Summer was out.
