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Step by Step
I.
Becoming sober, waking after years
Of wallowing, the inner absolute
Authoritarian of laughs and tears,
Involves some effort. Shouting, "You, there! Shoot!"
Will not provoke a gun to blast away
When power's gone and left you destitute.
The virt-cha-world I ruled? Denounced as play!
Abandoned! Now I face reality
And call it quite the sweetest holiday.
The former pressure? Pure monotony!
Within my sphere, my subjects never blink
Unless I say. It lacks democracy.
Imaginary creatures seldom think,
Will starve until I tell them "eat!" or "drink!"
II.
Unhealthy. Codependent. Truly blind.
The introvert's dilemma: choose control
Of something false? Or peer beyond to find
A solid place where science spreads its soul,
Where flower scent begins and textures dwell,
Where food has crunch, and music, rock and roll.
I haven't slept in days, of course. It's Hell!
Explosive revelations flood my eyes
With images I once would just dispel.
It takes a pill or two to blunt my sighs,
Convincing every flinching thought, "Relax.
Of course the situation horrifies!
"Causality's in charge! The truth attacks
And leaves us gasping flat upon our backs!"
III.
Pretend is lovely, yes, I will admit.
To wrap myself eternally in dreams
Compelled my thoughts for decades. Then I quit.
I smelled myself in flowing, fragrant streams,
Reflected faces popping everywhere,
Philosophies the same despite regimes.
I need the other, need to blankly stare
At someone else's way of thought and deed
From civil rights to how I comb my hair.
Opinions all display a certain greed,
A wish to lodge in every human brain.
To fight that tendency's my current need.
So out I crash! My knees and ankles sprain!
I'll know the outer world or go insane!
Becoming sober, waking after years
Of wallowing, the inner absolute
Authoritarian of laughs and tears,
Involves some effort. Shouting, "You, there! Shoot!"
Will not provoke a gun to blast away
When power's gone and left you destitute.
The virt-cha-world I ruled? Denounced as play!
Abandoned! Now I face reality
And call it quite the sweetest holiday.
The former pressure? Pure monotony!
Within my sphere, my subjects never blink
Unless I say. It lacks democracy.
Imaginary creatures seldom think,
Will starve until I tell them "eat!" or "drink!"
II.
Unhealthy. Codependent. Truly blind.
The introvert's dilemma: choose control
Of something false? Or peer beyond to find
A solid place where science spreads its soul,
Where flower scent begins and textures dwell,
Where food has crunch, and music, rock and roll.
I haven't slept in days, of course. It's Hell!
Explosive revelations flood my eyes
With images I once would just dispel.
It takes a pill or two to blunt my sighs,
Convincing every flinching thought, "Relax.
Of course the situation horrifies!
"Causality's in charge! The truth attacks
And leaves us gasping flat upon our backs!"
III.
Pretend is lovely, yes, I will admit.
To wrap myself eternally in dreams
Compelled my thoughts for decades. Then I quit.
I smelled myself in flowing, fragrant streams,
Reflected faces popping everywhere,
Philosophies the same despite regimes.
I need the other, need to blankly stare
At someone else's way of thought and deed
From civil rights to how I comb my hair.
Opinions all display a certain greed,
A wish to lodge in every human brain.
To fight that tendency's my current need.
So out I crash! My knees and ankles sprain!
I'll know the outer world or go insane!
Nice sonnet form, and I didn't notice any flubs in the structure. Though it's interesting how you kept the standard rhyme scheme, yet split up the stanzas in groups of 3 lines instead of 4. With only one exception, you kept those 3-line stanzas as discrete thoughts, and I'd wondered if you'd set yourself a challenge of doing so: Making the rhyme scheme at different intervals than the narrative units. But then I'd bet there's already a formal type of sonnet that does this, and I've just never heard of it.
My take on this is that it's about someone who's become prominent in some manner of closed world, probably video games, though possibly some D&D type thing that's not necessarily virtual in an electronic sense, but now that world has become obsolete or non-functional or abandoned to the point the narrator realizes spending any more time there is a waste. So he's now venturing into the real world and resolving to learn how to interact in it.
All the poetry is pretty good this round. Relatively speaking, someone has to finish last, but none of them in isolation struck me as something I would have expected to finish last.
My take on this is that it's about someone who's become prominent in some manner of closed world, probably video games, though possibly some D&D type thing that's not necessarily virtual in an electronic sense, but now that world has become obsolete or non-functional or abandoned to the point the narrator realizes spending any more time there is a waste. So he's now venturing into the real world and resolving to learn how to interact in it.
All the poetry is pretty good this round. Relatively speaking, someone has to finish last, but none of them in isolation struck me as something I would have expected to finish last.
This is a terza rima thing:
Where the 1st and 3rd lines of each stanza rhyme, and the 2nd line rhymes with the 1st and 3rd lines of the following stanza. You then pop a little couplet in at the end of each section, and you've got something that looks sort of like a sonnet but isn't.
As for the subject matter, I could use a little more, another section maybe to strengthen the idea of why our narrator wants to get out into the real world. But I always want more, don't I? :)
Mike
Where the 1st and 3rd lines of each stanza rhyme, and the 2nd line rhymes with the 1st and 3rd lines of the following stanza. You then pop a little couplet in at the end of each section, and you've got something that looks sort of like a sonnet but isn't.
As for the subject matter, I could use a little more, another section maybe to strengthen the idea of why our narrator wants to get out into the real world. But I always want more, don't I? :)
Mike