Hotspur
The old stallion calls me
Out of fear of unrest,
and the unknown.
He needn’t have bothered;
The dream is restless
And I walk alone
In a land of strangers.
The Mooken
Dream of their goddess
Dayang Dayang Mangilai
And her sacred dangkan tree
Each blossom, they say, each leaf
Tells a story
Joined by so many
Vines and branches all tangled
together.
And they speak of their great
Kalamats
The most skilful, it is said
Could trace by moonlight
The ways and paths between
And in doing so,
Illuminate for themselves
The dreams of others
I am no god
Nor have I ever known a goddess
Save the Sun and Moon.
Yet dreams do not lie.
I behold the tree:
It is dead.
Its branches are gone
Its trunk is gone
And its roots are covered
In thorns of the thousand
Black roses that ensnared it,
Sapped it of its life,
And died themselves:
Their petals form a stygian carpet
Upon the grave.
There is another tree,
Sprouting from the
Broken limbs of the first
And it lives
And branch by branch
I can follow it
And trace its stories
I step closer and the dream
bends
around
me
A lily, wilted
And in its place
A rose, black without
But a bloodier shade within
A rose by any other name
Is just as cruel;
Littlemoth
Palei Hantu
Changeling
why don’t they suspect me yet
i had no choice i was starving
knew i couldn’t hide amongst
the two-legs but all the others were
dead
and i couldn’t pass the Wall
for fear of being
trapped
too risky they said
the two-legs can see
the things between
and will see you too
i took the risk
A bluebell droops over
The roses’ head
Leaning ever
Closer
I am a dedicated bull, Palei Hantu.
When I caught you bedding my brother
and you ran from his hut
of course they found out
i was stupid, desperate
but not dead like the others
why did he chase me
to the Wall of all places
even we avoid that place
perhaps he knew and thought
he’d trap me outside
i took another risk
and though spotted by
the Myinn guard
who sat up startled
after you vaulted the rampart
shouted and flung his spear at me
a quick confounding and
the guard was none the wiser
i had to find someone to replace
too many eyes and ears on the wall
i slunk away found one
with wings of skin and grey
i was so careless i had no time
her body thrown off the
docks
All around a chorus
of whispers
answers:
The lines between
dreams
blur
and though i feed
upon them
drew the gazes of the room
like a lightning-bug upon a darkened stage
and the foolish guard
until Dawn Patrol fluttered to her flame
and another
as our tangled bodies
sung carnal hymns
to each other
i know
it won’t last
i know
they'll find her
any day now
i'm trapped again
where are the boats
where
are
the
boats
The question
Rings out;
The whispers
Are silent
Confused
And waiting
A dawn lotus
floats
in the black rose’s
shadow;
It’s petals
All the darker
It answers;
I listen
Littlemoth
dances behind my eyelids. I can’t let them get
her
Can’t let them know because as soon as they do they’ll chase them and they’ll come after
her
and the others. I can’t stop the ships forever, but if I can find a moment alone with
her
I’ll flee with
her
As soon as I can get
her
alone
At the thought
Of the ships, the
dangkan responds:
A creeper
girdles the
tree trunk
choking
the life
of an
emerald
limb
Majority refuses to answer
when we ask him why the
boats have stopped coming
I suspect something
is going on; that we are not
being told the truth or rather
Majority is not telling the truth
Where is the money going
no trade and yet he
refuses to lower the taxes
he demands a skeleton
crew (let’s face it: our
garrison is nearly empty
if one discounts the
drunks and tuft-ears)
needs not the funds
he’s been hiding he says
a ship’s come in down at the docks
I don’t believe him of course
but I’m not sleeping so where’s
the harm in confronting the
old sod
Feck 'em both.
Gonna wake me up
by trippin' over me
at half past midnight
stumblin' toward the docks
Silence
surrounds and
I merely wish
I had known
that that
was what
I wanted
Enough.
I step away and the dream
breaks
around
me.
The tree stands still again
Its limbs singing
Of world brought to ruin
For the want of vengeance
And safe harbour;
In the name of love
And righteous suspicion
Born of greed;
And death born
Of greed
Giving birth to
Unfounded suspicion
In the name of unfounded
Hatred
Until all the blossoms one by one
Wilt and fall
In a flaky rain that
Covers the carpet of thorns
Upon which the tree rests
The rain
will not
stop until
all of the
branches
are bare
Perhaps Dayang Dayang Mangilai
was no goddess
But a pony
Condemned to
Watch
The mistakes of others
Powerless
To stop the fall of all she held dear
And I know, now
What great lament she cried
When she saw the
Very roots by which
Her tree grew and spread
Its limbs, were the agents
Of its long undoing
Peridot is dead and I
will not
mourn her passing.
And yet I wonder:
For this, will I
fall with them?
Dawn comes, and I must
Leave this dream for the other
Though my thoughts linger
On that final flower.
Know this, Majority:
There
will
yet
be
a
reckoning.
She stands
By the docks
Refusing to answer
The voice of the dangkan
And a cloudless sky.
Far above
The pale moon
Whispers:
“We will meet again
before you die.”
Since I know I'm going to get questions about it:
I had to manually craft the side-by-side sections with an arcane combination of [quote] and [right_insert] in order to match the submission received. Code available upon request.
And yes, FIMFiction does support right-justified text. It's totally undocumented, but click on the "center" button to get centered text like this:
[center]centered![/center]
and then just replace "center" with "right".
Edit: also note, among other wordcount problems, fimfic counts all of those [right] / [/right] tags as words, so this one shows up as way over the limit. It isn't.
2017 edit: I'm pretty sure that FIMFiction's changes in the last year or two broke the coding. :( I fixed it up as best I could.
6461652
That's some impressive fimfic-fu
The textual lengths that this one goes to incorporate the actual dream-viewing is impressive, too!
Because I can't help myself:
"it's petals" there in the middle should be "its petals".
But here, Hotspur says that Majority Vote did it because Peridot was becoming too troublesome. But Vote seems more a talker than a doer: I'd expect him to try to buy Peridot off first, then as in the previous entry, hire somepony to kill her if she didn't take the deal. I still like the changeling as maguffin, though, and the lines and the form here--congratulations, Horizon, on getting it to post--is very nice.
Mike
Gotta give props to the formatting (and to Horizon for making it work on fimfic). But, I quickly found it frustrating to read. I think that has more to do with my lack of exposure to (or realized appreciation of) formal poetry than anything else. But, I found myself trying to re-compartmentalize sections in my head and read them in that manner, in the hopes that I could glean more from the sections.
As for the words themselves, I do like the idea of a Changeling among the crowd. Fits well with the overall environment in the original piece. Author, have a tip of the ol' cap. :)
I like the form, and some of the language is very beautiful, but I'll be quite honest: I can't make heads nor tails of what this piece is trying to say. I'll come back to it later.
This one had a lot of fun with the formatting. It resolves a lot of mysteries:
Littlemoth is a changeling
Littlemoth is Palei Hantu
Littlemoth slept with some of the minotaurs to get love
Littlemoth fled to the village
Littlemoth offed the real Littlemoth
Majority Vote murdered Peridot
Hotspur is the nightmare
However, the formatting, neat as it was, ended up being a bit garbled when it had to go into the quoted sections – while I figured out it was a different person, it took me a bit to figure out who he was, and the formatting ended up feeling distracting in places, subtracting from rather than adding to the piece, particularly in the slanted lines.
That said, the actual poetry itself was quite solid.
I really like this one! It reasonably answers most--nearly all, even--of the mysteries of the original. The format both feels thematically appropriate and does a stellar job of showing Hotspur's dream hopping. The poetry was solid throughout; I especially like how it incorporates the other dreams in a seamless manner. No real complaints for this one.
6461652
Looks lovely. Thanks for touching it up