Free will

[dragonqueen]

The writing on the wall was in braiile.

Blindly I stretched out my hands to see.

But the letters melted away from me,

Changing, reforming, slipping and sliding,

Serpent's letters not intended for my eyes.

I grope for guidance,

And fate twists away from my dirty paws.

Thin air meets my fingers.

What to do when the omens

are muddy, the portents

fuzzy?

The oracle is drunk,

and no longer a virgin,

and God is out to lunch.

Jesus'll take a message,

but no guarantees.

The blind man cannot hear,

The deaf man cannot see.

And I'm too sober to understand it all.

The threads of destiny are unraveling,

And Atropos has lost her scissors.

The stars are on strike;

No destiny, no fate,

Even the fortune cookies are blank.

We are left to ourselves,

creatures of whim,

tops with no path to spin.

Nothing to govern our lives,

but our own misguided selves.

It is revealed then;

this is free will.

Complete and total anarchy,

accompanied by a side of chaos.

The world's out to lunch.

[Wyvern]

I really like this poem, dragonqueen. :-) I found a number of the images that you used to convey the lack of fate in people's lives very interesting, with the blank fortune cookies and the moving braille standing out to me in particular. The comparison of ourselves to "tops with no path to spin" was also very good, and the hopelessness of the situation was driven across well through the listing of descriptions and events.

 

One aspect of this poem that I had more mixed feelings about was the tone, as the lines about God and Jesus felt casual and comic to me while the lines preceding them felt more formal and desperate. For this reason, the repetition of "out to lunch" that brought the poem to a close felt somewhat awkward to me, as I felt that the lines with a more comic tone were sort of in the minority in this poem. The repetition there is promising, so you might consider refining or expanding upon those lines in future revisions. Also, the "dirty paws" and "fuzzy" portents in the poem felt sort of random to me... was the narrator meant to be portrayed as furry in some way? I have yet to discover the reason behind the Banquet Hall's current obsession with the adjective "fuzzy"... it still strikes me as a vague piece of vocabulary with no particular feeling or emotion attached to it.

 

Anyway, I definitely liked this poem overall dragonqueen. :-) Thank you for sharing it with us. Here's hoping that the oracle was boozing on Bruteweiser and not on Ol' Peculiar...