Hmm, seeing as the original post suggested people "post their artwork," I thought I might share a short extract from the play I am working on at present. It does seem rather presumptuous to foist this upon people so I hope you will forgive me. This is a soliloquy from the main character, who represents something of a quixotic figure. It laments the perceived harshness of physical love. To be honest, after reading Virginia Woolf's Orlando, I feel rather sceptical about continuing in such a style but still, the free-verse form is at least an attempt to break with convention. I guess I just found this was the style in which the themes I wanted to express seemed to best work.
Couer: So, love is assigned according to its measure!
Its scope defined by an exacting science, its sighs
By geometric place. Euclid does shape
Erotic flavour, for passion is ruled fine by
All that it can encompass and those trifles of mind
And spirit are ashen-choked with his humble pie!
The human dimensions bring forth place
And men are thus into enslavement born
Or given liberty at nature’s mandate. The foul
Formed covenant of scribe and scribble stands
But weak against its fleshy confinement and
Soars sightless to the winds to be dashed upon
A corporeal theme. I howled my love in font and speech;
Now dammed as waxen feathers waveborne to the world!
Too high my hope cast its target and friendly sun now
Blisters broken heart with its concordance of silence.
My rude aspect doth knock upon her emerald
Doors and, bursting forth such, profanes her fairness
With a cumbersome gait at odds with once fair affection.
Nor soothed by eloquence or romantic retort,
Be this beastly plainness but clothed such
In brutish hue that it does quell the merry tongue
To bashful sloth where it quakes behind teeth;
The guilty engine of its own loving inculcation!
Oh cited sight whom across your gaze love is stuck
Lance-like to the heart! I curse the light
Itself that carries envoy of my rude report
To staunch the fires which blazoned once abreast!
Light, you mercurial realist; smiter of hopes upon a form,
How support you two such countenances
So unalike in dignity yet so closely beamward-knit?
It is a fitful skein of needles to impale a happy chance,
For all the measures of love and men are undone
By a prick of doubt that wakes Mab’s fair dream,
And outcasts nomadic man to wander lonely
Under the mocking stars of love’s wooden rood.
What once were guiding angels, were but sirens on the way;
Solitude now beckons sure as night-time follows day.
