The tetractys poetic form was devised by the late Ray Stebbing as a grammatical 20 syllable verse of 5 lines.Syllable sequence 1,2,3,4 & 10.Each line to stand on its own,as in my example Ichthys below.The challenge is to express a complete thought,profound or comic,witty or wise within the 20 syllables.The tetractys can be doubled or inverted.
ICHTHYS
White
blossom,
a welcome
springtime emblem,
the foretaste of succulent fruit to come.
BLUE NUDE-Matisse
Her
figure
created
stark sensations,
aroused by the simple blue cut-out shapes
NATAL THERAPY
To
forget
those bygones
done and dusted,
lost,forgiven and now forever gone.
SHORT MEASURE
Eye
poems
displaying
a shapely form-
exempting audition from needless stress.
SUMMER BALL
Love
blossomed
suddenly
that evening
they met by chance,in the 'excuse me' dance.
RENEWAL
Rain
upon
frozen earth,
metamorphised,
now emerging as bluebells in the glade.
REVERIE
Way
beyond
bygone's reach,
ambitions lay
buried deep in his forgotten dreams.
Every revolution ever
Devised by the most clever
From the rot, they sever
And souls naive
Of anew, believe
Assuming it not too far gone
To rectify all that’s wrong
They must be ready to stand up, then
For combat in the villain’s den
And although it is not as mighty
The sword decides who holds the pen
Yet history provides a warning
And the idealist may end up mourning
For those without a Machiavellian trait
Are warriors destined for a tragic fate
As it seems that thoroughly good men
Will never be esteemed as great
Those who gain control may revise the theme
Drifting ever further from the dream
Men of puerile mind
To knives are blind
And that vision once so fabled
Destroyed by some, we many enabled
On reflection, it makes the morose sigh
When they hear that brave man’s cry
“We serve neither King nor Kaiser”
Acting as a battle galvaniser
Due to the fact that ‘ad finem’
There’s superficial change achieved since then
And all of us are none the wiser
Before the chip, before binary code,
Before clocks showed in digital time mode,
Stood an ancient man with furrowed brow
Trying to track time and count numbers in a row.
He stared at stars, watched the sun,
He devised how to count when time had begun,
Using the flanges of his fingers one by one,
Counting seconds, minutes, days, and months done.
He counted numbers digitally on his hands.
One to five, six to ten, on which his pointer lands.
Strange that all our digital devices and displays.
Remembers the term 'counting with fingers' still plays.
Through haunting steps was I lured here
By a melody faint but clear
To this glen where fancy drifted
By the rays my sight was gifted
Peering through a portal twixt
Fae and mortal realm are mixed
With heavy eyelids did I trace
Beyond a doorway fairy laced
A land that to a sleeper seeming
Would only appear to one who's dreaming
So with a nodding head did I
Accept an invitation devised
To set aside these earthly ways
And wonts belonging to the day
For a realm where sprites aplenty
Weave a spell soaked litany
They prance and dance for my surprise
To these misty mortal eyes
And caper on until a time
For fairy bells to warning chime
The dawning of lights soon arrival
To Herald the end of dreams survival
Now all the fae folk gathered hence
Did ask a further moment whence
To linger this side of the gate
And escape their morning fate
They beckon to this dreamers eyes
And plead that for one moment more
Deny the truth which soundless lies
Beyond the bounds of dreamings door
SHAPE FORM digitally devised drawing
A limerick-composing old man
Devised a most devious plan.
Rejecting convention,
I fear I must mention,
He fried all his verse in a pan.
Beneath the palm trees, Santa sighed, forlorn,
His sleigh stuck fast, his reindeer worn and still.
The Florida sun rose bright that Christmas morn,
A far cry from the frosty North Pole's chill.
The elves devised a clever, timely scheme:
They called on dolphins to replace the sleigh.
With flippers strong, they swam like in a dream,
And Santa laughed, "We'll save this Christmas Day!"
Through waves they flew, with gifts for every child,
A coastal cheer spread warmth both near and far.
Santa proclaimed, his heart and face beguiled,
“Even the tropics can't outshine our star!”
Say hello to my little friend!
I sit them on my lap.
The stage is ours for us to lend
Towards you as you clap.
Following this brief applause,
My friend and I converse.
Much difference between our jaws
And dialogue disperse.
Normal as I speak my lines
In verbal application.
As my friend talks, there are signs
Of voice exaggeration.
The words are mine - as they unwind,
My lips almost in seal.
This procedure, you will find
Is there for your appeal.
Any movement from my friend
Is simply improvised
By my hand in styled trend...
Pre-planned and devised.
Our purpose is to entertain
For more applause there after...
Aiming to avoid disdain
And to promote your laughter.
AI is the ultimate plagiarist
mimicking patterns in human devised data.
Its models needs training on high quality data,
billions and billions of bits and bytes
of high-quality human derived thoughts and information.
But, AI output, with its hallucinations and flaws,
now has begun to flood into the data sources themselves.
Just like inbreeding,
the training becomes regurgitative,
feeding off its own output recycled.
With no way to tell the difference
between original and AI derived stuff,
the models become dumber and dumber
as each model learns from the previous one.
Rehashing the trash, disgorging, re-eating its own sick.
AI is its own Tower of Babel, the omniscient fountain of all insight, capable of all and anything, is fundamentally flawed and inbred.
AI is destined to become a rabble,
a Babel babble, incoherent, useless flotsam and jetsam.
Leonard Bailey’s tombstone was cryptic
“one gathered in unison of solitude”
some thought they had solved the riddle
was it devised by Leonard himself or his wife?
It was inscrutable to most.
Very few thought they understood it.
No one agreed.
Best tombstone in the cemetery.
And the most visited.
The One who seeks the end of man
has cunningly devised a plan
to rob him of his Maker’s gifts
through inner and outer conflicts.
Through evil men, He works His scheme
to deprive man of self-esteem
by urging freedom without restraints
and living life without constraints.
The chaos that His scheme creates
Leads nations into dire straits.
Then men arise, who crave power,
as saviors from the dark hour.
Dictators rise when chaos reigns
because it titillates their brains.
And when they get to hold the reins
society is held in chains.
Beware of those who chaos sow
inciting hate and preaching woe.
Such only care for their own gain
And cause real pain, when’eer they reign.
An Enemy lurks in the dark
its aims are clear, its methods stark.
Democracy its doctrine hates,
freedom of conscience it berates.
Behind the scenes its agents sow,
The seeds that to chaos grow.
He who once ruled will rule again
and it will be a tyrant’s reign.
America, return to God
or you will settle for a fraud
If you wish to become great,
Embrace God’s law, heed His dictates.
For the contrived inducement of fixated being,
the transmuting tenet of uniqueness,
the personified indented identity,
changes in the self-devised palette
of metamorphosed color mélange,
while the conjured chameleon slyly cocooned,
paints the shifting façade of deception.
In the ostensible enactment of life’s incredible drama,
the performance perfected in one-act play
with the obsession of passion professed,
gilding the consequence crafted by alchemy,
the surreptitious shift from one actor to another,
is an axiomatic drive of the dormant design.
Out of the limelight, the clandestine colors fade
on the tangible visage of virtual makeup,
the pallid original face morphs mystically into
the veracity mirror of fragile actuality,
reflecting the real rendering of identity,
rinsed with the primal hues of persona
of the distinctive disposition embodied once.
The spasm of schematic perception splits the mirror,
the shapeless shards of shattered pretence
scatter as discarded debris willfully abandoned.
Transformation creates the deluding entity,
an alien in its own renovated realm,
completes the illusive paradigm of contrast.
His heart was black as coal a cantankerous soul
So cruel and so unkind
He was ever so clever but never would ever
Reveal what's on his mind
It was commonly known was a cad fully grown
And a savage from birth
His only decision and only one vision
Was to ravage the Earth
Then one night in a dream the most devilish scheme
Ever devised by man
On a day in December a day we'd remember
He hatched his evil plan
With his hatred alive he then took a long drive
Down to the hotel Ritz
Soon his plan implemented a bomb he invented
That would blow it to bits
As a matter of fact he thought the hotel was packed
But it was empty instead
By the light of the moon the bomb blew up way too soon
And brought it down on his head
The news got the story it was ever so gory
But we all know the rest
No longer no trouble lied dead in the rubble
The hotels only guest
When the music of life gets silenced
in the broken violin of the extant in an instant,
submerged in the regression of solitude,
morphed soul hears the murmur of the ancient stream.
Released there from the clasp of karmic destiny,
I transcend the limits of time and space,
where the pristine petals of awareness unfurl,
bloom the divine flower of the cosmic essence.
In the devout sanctum of heavenly freedom
the soul attains the timeless form of euphoria.
The beauty of ultimate oneness it beholds,
merging shapeless with the absolute supreme.
Detached from the transient life’s enmeshing web,
I lose mind-body identity in the sanctum of divinity,
where time is lost in the eternal deep silence,
the soul is configured into His omnipresent image.
For the maneuvered inducement of the being,
the transmuting tenet of the unique identity
changes in the self-devised palette of color mélange,
paints the shape shifting façade of the celestial entity.
With 26 days left of school,
The teachers of 5th grade
Devised a list for every day
And thus a plan was made.
So following the alphabet,
Each date has something set.
Today, Adventure Day was
Most exciting, I would bet.
For all 5th graders got to tour
The middle school to see
Exactly where, when school begins
Next year, they’re going to be.
On other dates they’ll get to have
Some X-tra time to play
Or perform a singing Broadway show
On special Music day.
The countdown goes to Zero
Since they’ll graduate and then,
In middle school a longer countdown
Will begin again.
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