the poetry, short story, essay, and general literary thread.

[nieh]

don't know if there's a thread like this already, but I thought it would be interesting to have a thread where people could share anything that they have written. I've been getting into writing more and I'm interested in what other people have written, so share!

[goroth]

I wish I could write
ideas never gain wings,
thus fades ambition

[IEatCats]

It's five syllables?
I think it's something like that.
Was that part seven?

[snipelfritz]

I pity the fool
who act like he can't haiku
is haiku a verb?

[IEatCats]

How do you Haiku?
Seriously, how do you?
I don't get this shit.

[Achtane]

Gotta write about
Trees and honor and swords and
Fuck, I dunno man

[IEatCats]

I bought a car.
Hopefully it won't die.
I BOUGHT MY FIRST CAR!

[greyscales]

Shouldn't every one of ryan summit's posts be here?

[D.o.S.]

You gotta pay to read my shit, son.

[wsas3]

I wrote a short story a while ago if I can be bothered to dig it up I will.
Not trying to be snobby I literally do have to dig it up I have no clue where it is and I have finals this whole week :P

[snipelfritz]

Same here. I'll post it when I'm on my computer later tonight. I wrote the thing in two sittings back in October and really need to expand on some parts. Just haven't had time.

[IEatCats]

I still like haikus.
Seriously, they're just fun.
And pretty easy.

[snipelfritz]

So here's my weird sorta pulp/noir zombie story. The ending was thrown together and needs some serious revision.

ACT I

Drifting in and out of sleep in my office chair, I finally realized I'd had enough of my busy work. The street lamps had been illuminating the part of town where the French Quarter bleeds into the Big Easy. I took the last swig of my now cold dark roast and stood up, collected my jacket, briefcase and walked out of the small office. As I locked the door, I cursed the new cleaning staff under my breath and wiped the dust of my name plate which read:

DEAN HAGGART
PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR

Suddenly, I came out of the lull of the slow, uneventful days all too familiar to those in a dying private practice becoming aware of someone hurriedly running up the stairs. The audible footprints soon manifested as a young man, ragged, panting, and covered in dirt. His long, unwashed hair and distressed clothing gave him the appearance of a common junkie.

His whirlwind entrance had completely disrupted what had been a cool and sanguine fall evening. Breathing heavily and speaking in a Cajun drawl that still perplexed me since I moved to this city from Portland six years ago, he managed to convey two words: "Detective" and "help." Initially confused and somewhat threatened, however thirsty for clients, I conceded, and reopened my office and walked in.

Looking behind him, as if he might be followed, the young creole followed me, closed and locked the door behind him. I sat behind my desk, opened the drawer, and put my hand on the pistol that had sat there unused since the day I opened my practice.

Secure in my office, from what appeared to be nothing but the creeping night, the stranger produced a wrinkled, old piece of paper. Still hardly unable to speak, he pushed the slip of paper into my hands and began a stuttering cavalcade of incomprehensible babble. Overwhelmed, I slipped the paper into my pocket without looking. I told him to stop, to slow down. He took a breath and said a name: "Le Roi de la Morte."

No sooner than he had uttered this ominous and perplexing title, a loud painful creaking came from outside followed by the upper branches of an elm crashing through my office's second story window smashing the lamp limiting the light to just the illumination from street lamps. Diving from my chair, pistol in hand, I edged to the wall. My visitor ran to the door frantically attempting to unlock the door and escape. As my initial surprise wore off, the unthinkable happened; a figure climbed through the window. Ghastly thin, hardly clothed, the grey body moved into the office with an inhuman swiftness. His dead, black eyes quickly scanned the room and focused on my terrified visitor. He pounced across my desk pinning the young man to the floor and began clawing and tearing at his flesh. Still astounded, I aimed my gun and took fire at the attacker. An admittedly poor shot, I was surprised that three of the four bullets landed in the middle his back. This paled in comparison to my amazement that the attacker didn't acknowledge at all the hot lead in his spine. In the time that the smoke settled, the figure had risen from the dark corner where he had assaulted the young Creole. He turned, pounced over the desk and dove out the window.

Terrified and perplexed I took a moment then sprang into action running to the window expecting to see the crumpled body of the attacker. There was none, only the tree which had been knocked over apparently without a single tool.

I then turned to the victim. It was a horrible sight. His face, chest and throat had been clawed open. Much of what had been his well-defined features were spread across the hardwood floor. I didn't need to check his pulse, I knew the man was dead, that had been the attacker's one and only goal.

The next day I cancelled my appointments and stayed home. The police still had my office locked down as a crime scene anyway. Sitting at my kitchen table, replaying over and over in my head the night before, I remembered the slip of paper that the young man had handed to me. I got my jacket and brought it to the table.

The paper was old, worn, yellowed. It had been penned upon in dark ink, not the kind that comes from a common ball-point, no it was older. The main figure was a snake devouring it's own tale in the form of a circle, a familiar symbol, drawn darkly with a number of divisions and symbols, some basic, some foreign and incomprehensible to me. Along the outside where what appeared to be names or titles from the Cajun French I had only become vaguely familiar with. At the top of the circle it said, "Le Roi de la Morte" I remembered the young man uttering that name. At the time it seemed like nonsense, "The King of the Dead," but now it struck me with a sense of unexplainable discomfort and fear.

There was one more thing in the bottom corner the paper that stood out to me, it was the only thing that appeared to have been scribble in recently with a modern pen: "Mme. Toussaint's" I, being a nearly out of work investigator myself, knew this was my only lead, so I found my way to the French Quarter.

ACT II

After hours of muddling between boutiques, fish venders and interviewing people on the street in my own broken Cajun French, I eventually found myself in a small alley with five doors along the walls. One at the far end of the alley was painted dark purple with silver stars and a moon around it. The sign above held the same theme and read:

MME. TOUSSAINT
PREDIRE, ENSORCELER ET BOUTIQUE MYSTIQUE
FORTUNE-TELLER AND MYSTICAL EMPORIUM

I entered the shop dark shop, immediately being overwhelmed by the scents of incense and perfumes but also astounded by the plethora of artifacts beyond my recognition. Were they instruments and ingredients of some old amalgam of religion and black magic? I didn't know. Mme. Toussaint, who bore the visage of a common gypsy fortune teller give or take some jewelry, swiftly appeared, from where I wasn't quite able to decide. I asked in stilted French if she, in fact, was Madame Toussaint. Upon an affirmative answer I asked outright, against my better judgement, about "Le Roi de la Morte". She pretended not to understand, so I handed her the paper that had been given to me. Her eyes became wide. I told her it had been given to me by someone and that someone is no longer alive. The second piece of information did not seem to surprise her in the least.

Mme. Toussaint locked her shop's front door and signaled me into the back. We sat on mats on the floor of a room saturated with incense and she poured tea for herself and me. I accepted it; thirst was the last thing on my mind. The stench of mystery hung in the air.

Suddenly, the scent of the tea overwhelmed me and I became overcome by a thirst for it's sweet but refreshingly bitter herbal taste. Despite the near scalding temperature of the fresh brew, I quickly found myself consuming the better half of the demi-tasse which I held.

Suddenly my self-awareness returned. I looked up to the grinning Madame Toussaint, who had not touched her tea, and quickly realized there was some other "herb" in this tea I wasn't quite tasting but was beginning to feel. No stranger to psychedelics in my younger days I calmed myself, took a breath, and stared the supposed "fortune-teller" down.

I asked her what this was all about: the paper, the name, the savage attack I still was still replaying in my mind and began her tale...

"I do not know how you came to have this" she said referring to the slip of paper which she handed back to me, "but it will mean grave consequences for you, child..." her voice began to trail as the smoke of the incense filled my mind.

I felt as though the smoke of the candles and incense had come out of the darkness behind me in the shape of a thin but far-reaching arm which grabbed me by the back of my head and pulled me into another place entirely. That place was the world of Cajun woman's tale, the tale of a man, a man of unknown origins, seemingly a ghost when he appeared out of the bayous. That man sewed himself into the underworld of the city, first in the French Quarter, controlling much of the drug trade, then he expanded his affairs across the rest of the city. He was everywhere, but no one knew how his influence had grown, how he manifested himself, who the man himself was. There was something unreal about the man. He had a power. Old magic, so to say, no voodoo. Something so dark that history had tried it's hardest to bury it accompanying the dead who practiced in unmarked graves. But there remained one survivor: this man, this satanic witch-doctor, the King of the Dead. The magic itself became alive in him when he found the proper means of inciting old voodoo magic. He found a fragment, a recipe, if you will, for something time had tried to keep unknown, something inexplicably evil. And that was his secret, how he managed to gain his power grab and fuel his path of destruction.

Bodies, dead or alive, were his tools. Pawns in a game of control over the New Orleans underground. He had reanimated the dead to create his own army of assassins. The soulless, those with nothing to lose, had become his army. All that became necessary was the dead, and the dead existed anywhere familiar to the living. All that was needed was the body, willing or not, and the knowledge, and one could create a killer. Inhuman, if to be human is to have a soul. That is why he was "Le Roi de la Morte" "The King of the Dead."

ACT III

As Mme. Toussaint concluded her tale, my eyes opened, finding my body lying on the floor in a cold sweat however back on earth. Mme. Toussaint handed me another vessel, assuring me it was just water. Wary, I sipped it carefully, but quickly succumbed to my newfound thirst and drank much of it. It was at this moment that her tale read it's climax. The fact that the very sheet of paper I had come into possession of held that secret. She claimed that her name had clearly been added to it by the young man whose face and throat had been spread across my office floor, but the rest of the markings were as old as they appeared.

That man had sought me out for a reason. He lead me to Mme. Toussaint. I was being driven, whether deliberate or not, regardless if it was something I wanted, I was being driven further into this mystery. I supposed that's the result of advertising such intrigue as your line of work. This was far from the typical client: a wife who suspects her husband on cheating or a company background check. I now found myself on another plane of knowing, another plane of involvement, and frighteningly another plane of danger.

I stared at the shopkeeper for what may have been fifteen seconds or an eternity pondering walking out the door and never thinking of any of this again, but that was impossible, something juvenile which had laid dormant under mundane reality now found itself uprooted with a tenacity that would not allow me to leave what had already fallen into my lap. I asked Mme. Toussaint, as if prompted, one more question before she insisted I leave: "Where do I go now?" She snatched the paper from my hand and pointed to two of the symbols, the two closest to the top, closest to "Le Rois de la Morte." One appeared to be a church or a house, the other, a
black cat. Mme Toussaint abruptly lead me to her door, handing me back my paper. Before nearly pushing me out and barricading the door, she made one last comment: "Down the alley where you came, three blocks west and one block north, follow the music."

Sure enough Mme. Toussaint's directions lead to a neon lit block. The centerpiece of this neighborhood was a well advertised club called La Chapelle de le Chat Negre. It was the destination.

The front wasn't the correct entrance, that would seem strange, out of the ordinary. The alley around back seemed like the ideal means of entering. Two men stood in back, common club employees, dishwashers on a cigarette break. Briefly disrupting the mundane conversation of those who work for tips in order to move between them and into the back entrance was simple.

The back hall was simple to navigate. The correct path was as if illuminated ahead. The King was near, the scent of his influence perpetrated the walls like the pumping beat which brought in customers nightly to the club which likely operated as a front for all sort of trafficking, be it drugs, humans or something even more sinister. This was his domain, his castle, and I had become the lone assassin.

I had become something different, inhuman. That which I had consumed at Mme. Toussaint's had changed me. This moment was my first recollection, since then, of the concept of self I once know, but now something was different. I was no longer identifying something that was a part of me. I had began to redefine something which was now missing.

I found myself on the ground, kneeling over what once was a body. I was familiar with the visage, it was much like the young Cajun I had seen in what once was my office, the face, chest, and throat had been ripped apart in pure human aggression.

I stood, I ran, and I disappeared into the night, a body without a soul, a being without a self, a ghost. I disappeared.

[goroth]

I was actually serious with my shitty haiku. I can string a few words together, but I never feel like my ideas are worthwhile - the results don't match my ambition, or I just run out of steam. Sucks!

[D.o.S.]

I was actually serious with my shitty haiku. I can string a few words together, but I never feel like my ideas are worthwhile - the results don't match my ambition, or I just run out of steam. Sucks!

Writing a good haiku is one of the hardest things you can tackle, especially since most of the classics are translated, and lose something in that switch. Also, many of them relate to the seasons, which can be tricky.

Think about it like you're taking a photograph/Polaroid. A good haiku should be a snapshot of your environment that recreates the emotional resonance of stumbling upon a powerful (usually) natural phenomenon.

Like this one, by Soseki:

Over the wintry
forest, winds howl in rage
with no leaves to blow.

Nah mean?!