Escapril is was a yearly poetry challenge a la Inktober, started by author and poet Savannah Brown. It consisted of a list of prompts, one for each day in april, for which a poem would have to be written. My personal added rule is that you only get to look at the current prompt day-of, so as to avoid any pre-planning, ensuring that the resultant pieces would be genuine expressions of their moment for better and worse.
The issue is the following: It is March 31st and I just learned that there will be no Escapril 2025. Seeing how I will be very busy across four countries next month, I should accept this excuse for inaction gracefully, but my mind balks at the very concept of a poised defeat and has elected to petulantly dig its heels in instead. We will do this, however clumsily. Since time is short and since I have not participated in any Escaprils except the last one, my first best idea was to simply use one of the old set lists (and since I stupidly read the ones for 2023 and 2022, making it impossible to follow my extra rule, the choice fell on 2021). I'd be delighted if anyone decided to join me in this endeavour, but I acknowledge that it's a huge mess, so do not feel obligated to share in my folly. Escapril is dead, long live Escapril! (Yes, I'll come up with something better next year when I'll have time to prepare a more satisfying alternative). This page may be temporary, as I'll want to restructure the poetry section once the month is over.
It is late again, beast It is well past tomorrow No ritual wants you as priest You have run out of rhyme And exhausted your reason Though rhythm you managed the least Is it August or June? Is the planet still turning? At sunset as always too soon In just one thing consistent So pacelessly pacing Your screen is disturbing the moon
With forced breath, hypoxemically gasping I'm exhaling the last of the flame That propelled past the brink all my sinew To be left with a spectre unslain And I lift my gaze slowly to greet you Where you were when I started to run Where you're failing to be There is naught but a note That you left in the unsetting sun "I have painted myself on your vision I'm forever yet farther away Neither tortoise nor runner may catch me It's your choice now to try or to stay And I know that you aren't well rested And I know that you're dying of thirst But think back on the sights of your journey You're not first and not last to be cursed" So I curl to a ball one more message And remember forgetting the last I remember it filled me with trembling And look back on the hills that were passed On each peak stands a shape heaving wildly Some are screaming their rage at the sky Some are buckling under their tremors Some are looking me straight in the eye And I turn back to face to the future That's forever horizons away In the distance a small shape is waving And I think I might catch them today
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Through some words that I wrote drunk and loosing my mind I met critters of all types and skills Made a show of my views and what some might call wit And was offered a job apropos I lived past twenty five despite dubious moves To make use of my limbs and help out With the cash of a friend I knew just a few weeks I acquired a house for a cult Quit my flat and my studies and moved to the sticks Grew some veggies and stared at some math Toured the states on a bus more than one hundred hours After meeting the brilliant and rich I'll run twenty six miles at the end of next month In a few I'll be moving to France And I still barely know how I got to this point And I still don't know how it will end
Shatter-thing your eyes are mildly scary Limbs are stilted, hair won't acquiesce Appearance of the product's prone to vary Darling did you know that more is less? Shatter-thing you're failing at expressions Mirror neurons freshly out of ink To print for what they ought have cheap compressions Reflexively reflective one would think Shatter-thing you're imitating nothing Your sense of dress and posture are a joke Quite vain to boot and terrible at bluffing It would not solve your problem if I broke
They hungered for a lord A king of atoms, king of steel To crush beneath his heel everyone else He'd rid them of their pains Return the world to dreamt up pasts Hope empire outlasts his bloody reign So prayed the gathered crowd For years so lost now maybe found A king of haunted ground may take his throne And woe betide his flock But still more woe betides their prey With jester's privilege say that you foresaw Of course it wasn't hard To read the omens barely masked But noone cared or asked, Cassandra dear
Pave the way, lay bricks lay ley-lines Laymen, forge your tools, lay waste To the rot, hear down the grapevines Hark a setting sun take haste For mighty is not sword but hammer Mighty is a blinding thought That breathes to life a future's grammar Mighty is to build what ought Be built and mend what ought be mended Fill to brim your bag of tricks Heed laws of nature just amended Join us, mister, missus, mx And plant with us some fruit worth reaping Build that city on the hill So work once you are tired of weeping Harbour what they tried to kill
Principled distaste still seeks to bind me When flaunting feathers pretty though they are For marketing finesse is blind to value For bilks can hinde with glitter-dust the tar I will not use my shiny parts for evil Is freely said though never quite so clear Had others not begun I wouldn't echo I never would have crafted this veneer And so much have I won through surface glamours For others, for a cause I don't regret Through service smiles and honest leading statements When all lay down their arms I'll pay the debt Will wordchoice make you think my cause is valid? Will dress shirts make you trust me in this role? Will charme mean that you rent me your apartment? Will proving you were right then save my soul?
Holy the traincar in unceasing motion Holy the tracks and wherever they lead Spraypainted windows are already guarding 'Gainst whence you decided you needed to leave Haunted the skies and their symbol-packed payload Haunted by freedom that quickens your breath "No turning back" reads the tag on your luggage You'll hit the ground running and ground yourself fresh Shame then that cars cannot lock in your answer Can't leverage that spark to a torch for the quest Force you to choose at each point to keep stalwart Or waver and weave and at any point turn
You've read the unclean scapulae In hopes they'd tell you lies Adjusted all the ribs you threw That gods might take advice Though now you hold the longer end where fate has broke in two A wishbone of this forking path Vests unearned faith in you
A whisper Rushing through the Kuiper belt Last voices, broadcast radio And doom unknown — of yet unfelt A hand long dealt and never grasped The final wave has come and passed Through silence, cosmic, drawing breath For hours since it chose this path Four hours after aftermath And later further out of reach A lone dispersing monument Foretelling what we cannot teach With no impassioned parting speech Preceeds —just now— our epitaph So stranger, wish upon a star And hope it hasn't faded yet And weep for Ozymandias And weep for us for here we are For it is here And we are not
A decent home a steady gig Friends laughing and another swig To fade into this dulcet now Well earned insists a sweaty brow Well earned they try to tell themselves— And fruit is rotting on the shelves The world for now and evermore Embroiled in rather distant war Embroiled in rather petty games Of knowing and of saying names Of colleagues, leaders, stars, elite— A neighbour's dying on the street More wine, more music, better sleep The comfort they have earned to reap And not in more distressing dreams Eat rotting fruit in rising streams Eat rotten fruit from glutted shelves And comfort no one but themselves
The night has gotten older than you It will surrender to day before you will surrender to rest Time is weak like that Flimsy, from within the thought you are currently folding over itself again It buckles partway past the centre Makes a new noise Excited, slightly orange, sharp like there's some pressure behind, clearly sacred So you undo it, re-do it, see what sticks And multiple the sticky bits As the new pattern comes into focus it collides with something else in unwritten memory Some nameless, heretofore unrelated hunch only now bubbling up from the vaults of a life you must surely have had as a human creature You had vaguely forgotten about that You don't have time to remember it now as everything clicks into place and catches fire The symbols begin to have always meant everything Your brain refractors around its newest creation As you're caught on the other side of the folding now Unknown joints crack, arms stretch And the light breaks through your eyelids
In golden garb upon that hill The masses cheer she's fighting still Exhausted scream for all that's left to gain For months now with no time to heal I worry she is still not steel And meat will not withstand that kind of strain It's worse now than hyperbole Too hard, too fast with certainty And stopping here will hardly quench the thirst In time amongst the casualties Heart full of lead, mind full of bees While fools regard with awe her war-worn worst
So what do you mean? That the world will give up? That a=!a and the rest just anathema Or deductive dyspraxia? That a contradiction In the rules you have built it Will tear it apart? They're not its rules, they're yours It's not impossible, just painful Not a paradox, just zero sum So you do like Alanis And call failure unlawful The fact that you don't want it to go this way Does not mean that it can't Cause it will Cause the rules are much bigger FVC will not trigger And we aren't And have never been Dealbreakers One if not all The unstoppable force Or immovable wall Is a lie that you fell for And so something will give And it's probably us
You get pointlessly closer Cram the space Try to untie the serpent Crash full throttle into your very own buffer zone And find the same shit past the ligature Expanding with the worst of them Like cancer in a clown car You tile the sphere but not the plane Viaducts glutting dreams as you rot into biofilm Burnt yourself with the soldering iron again Same as yesterday — eternal amateur The errors will just keep multiplying And catch you in the riptide If you don't start working cleanly It's never begun here And it certainly isn't gonna end But with each step
Haven't fixed this yet, be careful Naked wire, do not touch And nerve cells freshly out of myelin Drowned in signal, scraped too much And scrapped for parts not yet replenished Naked loathing, naked fear Of half flayed skin not worth exposing That's the risk, now please sign here: ______
I'm not alone, I tell the ring-light Lying on this cluttered floor When I'm the one who pressed ignore I don't need help, I need to write And work and wane and someday fade And make it not another's chore Rely on none in Hobbes's war And mourn the pacts already made ...Or so the inner cynic pleads At night too numb to friendly smiles With most of them disjoined by miles Too blind to simple human needs But stray from Nikos' dread decree And vow with love for voice and touch To hope forever, fear for much Not so alone as to be free
Here's what I remember Off record, in secret If someone else asks I was not even there She cried on that day When the news started breaking She broke when they stopped Though she hid it with care They came not to help us And left with the ruins They held her head high To let bystanders see Here's what I remember Just fragments and noises As time passed and darkness Fell marginally
"Be haunted by allies and foes", chimes the belfry Be driven by wraithish hands holding your leash A sprawling pastiche of those riddles at Delphi Decedents of history rally their woes A presence, or millions, forever behind you Judging each stray from the path they have paved Or judging compliance, this dissonant whisper An offer to join once you're well past the grave A voice in the bricks and the earth and the forest Too old as to not be too tainted by time "Be haunted, but hell must pay penance to bind you To tare what the dragons have wrought in their prime"
See this homunculus lacking in essence Whittling its shapes into shards of the fray Empty except for an unceasing motion Aims for the end and with luck overshoots Bottle adrift in a tempest-swept ocean Empty except for an ink-sodden page Empty except for the air to keep floating Searching a vagrant to deem that enough See this homunculus measured in moments Running on fumes and on hope and on fear Empty except for a beehive and questions Empty except for the horrors of love See it embracing its singular purpose Empty except for some fuel and an oath Empty except for a tank worth refilling Empty except for Not empty quite yet
Has your fence become uncomfy? Have you freely left your post? Or did it not once lie much closer? Sacred centre, so you boast. It's not a fixture now your middle Halfway judged from hand-picked nodes And I won't come a half-step closer Not as past me ground erodes Looks quite bent, your front of iron Same as last time, so it seems Your "contra Hitler, contra Thälmann" "Contra Höcke, contra... Greens?" And when in doubt just contra action They're just Nazis, let them steer Exactly middle, badly chosen Backwards every passing year The current takes you. Kids are drowning Long past middle, near the end And still you're calmly drifting past these Burning walls you won't defend
I for eye, It's getting lonely. Built this shack to keep us dry, Broke this dam to surely drown you. Crammed our soul with notes whereby One day you must lose your footing. Ever sooner ends your reign. We'll outmanoeuvre, Slay and eat you. One of us shall Take your name. Head and hall Are insufficient Space for any of us all. We incomplete uneasy allies Plot and scheme your knee-deep fall. Above, below, contenders clangour None so far have passed our test Nor passed us by Cogito ergo— Ego. Landlord, Squatter, Guest.