Sanskrit poet's game

Just been reading an essay by Ron Padgett in which he talks about a Sanskrit poet's game in which poets supply each other with last lines rather than first lines. So, if the line provided was 'you are not green stink', the next person might write a poem that read

you are yellow smell
you are not pink fragrance
you are blue odour
you are not green stink

The object is to provide a last line that's as difficult as possible to get to.

So - each player here responds to the previous player's suggested last line with a new poem, then suggests a new last line for the next player.
Let's see if anyone's game. Here's a last line:

I saw then that architecture was not telephony

I travelled a thousand lands, for years i walked
and saw many buildings and Landscapes
many phonelines i also saw lain across these lands
I saw then that architecure was not telephony.

hmm tis very lame but i felt like having a go, heres my line:

The wastepaper basket soon looked up.

Careless I mutter on paper those lines
Unsatisfied with growing tension and ink
All and all into the garbage with sighs,
The wastepaper basket soon looked up

Try this one:

The graven flame was indistinguishable to a camel

In the desert, where some little flames were nothing special
One very small one held a sacred position at the temple
And truly tiny, burning faintly at the end of a candle,
The graven flame was indistinguishable to a camel

OK, here's another

The worms were becoming cardigans

James Brudenell did lead a troop
Whose calvary in Crimean lands
Eponymed those writhing soldiers group and,
The worms were becoming cardigan's

I couldn't resist making it possesive so don't even count this.

But if you do try this:

Leading Sanskrit's dialectic Ama-gi

Cheat! Oh wait. I see you're carrying your...poetic license. That's fine then.

I must express my suspicion, however, that the word you meant in your line is 'dialect' (a regional variant on a language) rather than dialectic (a form of argument). Am I right?

Nope, I meant what is there, good luck! ( We are supposed to make it difficult right?)

Aargh......

This argument can be described
as a Japanese town
one in which the simple geometries
of the old wood houses
open to the outside with
nary a discernible division
but in their fragility
and inherent insubstantiality
that is conceptual
a refusal of simple opposition
they are being opposed
and losing
to the flat impersonality
of history without progress
Glazed grey bricks and
concrete obliterating
rather than communicating
with a dead language.
Dad, you don't play fair.
Your language does kill
Demolishing ambiguity
Demolishing the past
Demolishing language
So that you seem to be
Leading Sanskrit's dialectic Ama-gi

Hey. Thanks, I needed that. OK, here's another:

Distaff plunges kleptocrat drain and they all go home to crystal mothers

Fate is more spun by memory
Life unhung through policy
Counting leveled premises and hardened carbon in our caves
"Got it tot" in both these aims and still one in the same
What other misery among another
For there is no honor amongst themselves

Clotho sits and weaves this shape though
Forming faith and place uprist
For those who placate sacred brothers
Are consequently--built by her list
Shapely graven by her hands
Working under bloody plans
Overburdened coutless sand
All and all shaped clay to man
From gold to iron bronze and cold
Light to dark and new to old
Sophic destined finger told
To create, create! the darkest mold
Poor and feeble woman, poor and slight of sight
Tired--careful lady, on her cane she sleeps at night
Pouring to that forming cauldron all her spite and pain
Stirring through those anguished fishes silent by the cane
Forcing every ounce of pallor fate into the shape
Of this and that and other men for his tyrranic plate
Leaning on that symboled staff watching metal mesh together
Distaff plunges, kleptocrat drain and they all go home to crystal mothers

Hahahaha that was great! I had to study a bit for that one. Try this out:


If careful and inspired, maybe zenith's would be lyre, would attempt to quell the fire?

My head hurts. But I'll be back.

On the morrow

Unmindful and quite tired, over at denise zenith's one day, I let my eyebrows catch on fire
Denise was out at choir at the time, and just as I couldn't always follow the rhyme (or meter)
I couldn't get the water to work (durned tap wasn't turning), but all the while my head was burning
I was reluctant to try the freezer (I'm a legendary, almost dangerous sneezer), but
Inside was an ice sculpture, a lyre pretty as a picture, a frozen monument to culture(etc.)
And as art has always been a balm to breasts and brows bereft of calm, thought, y' know,
If careful and inspired, maybe zenith's would be lyre, would attempt to quell the fire?

Phew. OK, sorry for the delay. Now try:

at this point, shipwrecked, the keystones appealed to Sennett for clemency

Mack turned slowly to Charlie as they sped through the monolith
This abstraction of cognito became the difference between them
Contracting as they finished past, the rocks were far dismayed
For the pair was off to flee the wrath of the Keystone Kops parray
Farther and farther off as Chaplin knew the way
But Sennet bit his finger nails and ate lemon meringue

Stormblast came and he was laughing along
He chased with flap of Kops, and moved us far and long
With slipping toes and pouring rain
As gest pursued with small bellow
Would tread the glances high and low
To far forward hang off beds
The clash rang fast and the ship went passed
The Kops we thought were dead

And so we came upon a beach, but never could we find
A place to park and so we crashed into that shallow slime
But the Koppers came about that isle and chased us round and round
We stopped and hid among the leaves to shiver under sound
And then animals would come to see and wither Police free
From their trousers, as they stopped belief in God on that far reef
We about, about, and came from out our silent secrecy
at this point, shipwrecked the Keystones appealed to Sennet for Clemency

Sorry for the delay, and shallow attempt but I am a bit intoxicated at the moment.

Try this:

as Apollo held Abaris' throat, Osiris conceded to Agni

You lose it a bit in the last strophe with all the forced rhyming, but the beginning is damn bloody brilliant. Please consider struggling on and making a real piece out of this.

More to follow.

Pythagoras farted ruminatively, munching a carrot,
wondering, what could be keeping Abaris, this funny
English guy apparently as tripped out by geometry
as by those strange mushrooms they'd eaten in honey.

Abaris seemed to be dosed at that very moment,
not that he could remember taking anything odd.
Perhaps it was the square on the hypoteneuse that did it,
but he was suddenly in a (non denominational) realm of gods:

a lovely kind of walled garden with, in the immediate
environs, Apollo and Agni having a less than heuristic
dispute with Osiris - something about logos, knowledge
- and fire, naturally, with Agni going characteristically ballistic

Pythagoras looked up noting a disturbing change to reality.
As Apollo held Abaris' throat, Osiris conceded to Agni.

It's a sonnet! And also comes out of a bit of study. Sorry for the delay. Now try

the point, Crissy, not punctuation/*!

wow...you guys are really good....I am completly baffled to what your saying, and at the same time I am awed. I really do love it. Now I have to study all this so I can make sense of it. ^^

Thanks, Loveless, glad you love it and thank you for resurrecting a little thread of which I'm very fond. Not sure you'll be able to make sense of all of it, mind.

When asked to write an essay on the history of Seville,
Little Crissy felt terribly ill.
Not knowing what to do (not knowing where Seville was)
She took out her pencil,
And wrote these following lines:

Always put a period at the end.
Use a comma and you may offend,
the teacher who grades you,
but not so much as if you were to use a semicolon:
A question mark is always good?
But only in the right neighbourhood.
Use an exclamation mark if you please!
But never as a tease!
These are the lessons in Seville,
I hope I pass this course still!

Crissy brought the page to the teacher who read with a grin,
She said to litte Crissy that she was lost,
Into the waste basket the essay was tossed
Then with a smile the teacher looked at Crissy and gave her this explaination:
The Point, Crissy, not punctuation!


Try:

The cat smiled and said "I prefer Plato"

At long last, a new respondant. Thanks Charles.

But what happened to Satirical I wonder.

I'll do another when I have a mo'. Unless anyone else wants to try in the meantime.

Mind if I cut in?


----
Erwin Schrödinger had a cat

It lived simply and wanted
Nothing more than to be left alone

Instead cruel Erwin
Had him repeatedly locked in a box
With a complex device involving
A cylinder of cyanide gas
And an atom
Of somthing radioactive

Half the time, Schrödinger's Cat
Was gassed
And the other half he was left for hours on end
In a state of being
Dead and alive all at once
(An exhausting state to be in.
Worse than Vermont.)

"What is this supposed to prove?"
Asked the cat (who was named Elmo) often.
"Quiet, you", snapped back cruel Erwin
"This experiment will make the both of
us more famous than Sophocles."

Elmo, seeing Erwin distracted
In his delusions of grandeur
Darted through his legs
Past the hideous device
And out the front door
(Which Shrödinger had left open)

Pausing on the front step, Elmo turned
To look upon Erwin's
State of sputtering speachlesness

The cat smiled and said "I prefer Plato"
----

Try this one:

Funny that a grapefruit could be so amoral

Milk and blood in Massai country

Idol worship

Human sacrifice

Jazz

Classical sculpture

Epic poetry

The new ‘predator’ range of four-wheel drive vehicles

Damn, it’s just all so strange, you know?

You eat a salad and you feel the mystery of life
Tiredness makes you hallucinate
Sitting in the park, but
No, that big black smear across the sky is real
Or have a waking dream of logic changing
You’re saying, I don’t respond to music like other people
But how can you know?
A fly drowns itself, seemingly on purpose, in your cardboard coffee cup
To punish you for your arrogance
Stupid fly

Then eat a grapefruit
and it spits in you through your eye

you knew that you’d seen logic change,
but still
Funny that a grapefruit could be so amoral

***

OK next, if there are any takers:

this message, scrawled in the scum left after a bath

She read it, then with a starting gasp,
She wondered and reread
And ran her hands through her hair.
The note was short
Of not many words
But she wasn't ready to admit to that.
So many thoughts
Made themselves up for the spaces.
She stared at the ceiling and sighed again
Finally
She wiped away the water from the floor
And read yet again
This message, scrawled in the scum left after a bath.


Ok....

But first she stumbled, laughing, to the rail.

There's a meter here of some sort. I know nothing about the technicalities of these things, but I know it when I see it and I'm going to try to play along:

******
You never know, with luck a train might pass,
She said, deflecting midges from her eyes
The orange sun was melting in a dusk
That skittered like a swarm of tiny flies

She touched the line like someone reading brail
Then cocked her head and bent it to the rail.

Her face dissolved in darkness in the grass,
And I was sure I felt a rumble in the ground,
Fear made my throat an empty husk,
I lurched at her and saw a funeral mound

I stumbled with a strangulated wail
And reaching for her, felt a rusty rail.

Awareness rose up as a rubber mass
I said, this line is dead, like someone on a phone
She showed her teeth beside me and I smelled her musk
She stood and left me lying there alone.

In a minute she would kiss my ear - she likes it when I fail
But first she stumbled laughing to the rail.

There. Better late than never. The next last line is:

The wind whipped down the skree

does it matter if it's terrible? :lol:


The wisest women sat gnarled and snarling
Left to their own meditative devices
A hint of ivy in the hair
Of green-eyed girls dancing stiff legged to bagpipes
On the coast of the roiling sea

Red haired in kilted caricature
Of any Scottish Postcard
From Aunt Betty in 1950
Scottish drinking man
Bangs his exposed knee
On a wayward wall
erected in clannish history
Climbing quick, slipping on shale
Chased by ghosts of hounds and lairds
As countless MacFarlans were afore he

He runs and skips and laughs a bit
At a stolen kiss from the green-eyed girl
In red haired curls
and the force with with she smote him
He whistles hi-hee and sings b-onnie,
while kissing his knee and
the wind whipped down the skree



next:
carefully falls the skeptic's shadow

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Riesa

does it matter if it's terrible? :lol:

---

No, but like, yours isn't. compliment fisher. ;)

A reminder, since we're onto a new page, the game is to take the line suggested by the previous poster and use it as the LAST line of your poem.

Admittedly, she seems earnest,
swearing a love that willl ever grow.
Wanting to believe, he turns,
carefully falls the skeptics shadow...

next: even as ambivilance escalates

(I don't think I spelled ambivilance correctly...sorry!)

Ambivalence. ;)

No poem - this is just to say that I love this thread! What a great idea!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Isagel

No poem - this is just to say that I love this thread! What a great idea!

---

Join in! Join in!

OK! Your wish is my command.

Did you
take out the trash?
Good, I´ll
do the dishes and
someone needs to
buy bread for tomorrow.
We play house
even as the ambivalence escalates.


Next, courtesy of the poem of the week:

Heigh-ya said Baudelaire

I'm glad I pushed for that one. Great stuff.

Thank you :-)

Richard Brautigan was
driving a 42 Pickup
down the Champs Elysée
when he picked up a hitchhiker
called Baudelaire
How far are you going
said Brautigan
I'm off to the Jardin du Diable
said Baudelaire
to check on my buds
Just then Brigitte
Bardot passed on
the promenade
fondling a stote
on her way to appear
on Celebrity Big Brother
Salut said Baudelaire
Can you pass on
a message to
Mon hypocrite
Lecteur, mon semblable
Mon Grand Frère
What's the message
said Brigitte
Heigh-ya said Baudelaire

The above is a parody of a Richard Brautigan poem I read and memorised at the age of about 15. From memory, it goes:

Baudelaire was driving
a 42 pickup
across Galilee
when he picked up a hitchhiker
named Jesus
how far are you going
said Jesus
Out of this world
said Baudelaire
Jesus said
take me as far as
the hill of Golgotha
I have an appointment
and I must not be late

The next endline for someone to write towards is:

Just a general description of something not there.

Engraved on stone,
his name,
date of birth,
date of death,
beloved.
Just a general description
of something not there.

(for someone lost last week, far to early. Almost strange, the way your sentence was what I needed to write down. I might need to work abit more on this poem, but there it is)

Edit - I forgot to say that I liked what you did with my nonsense line, now I have to go and look for more poems by Richard Brautigan. Thanks for posting the poem.
Next:
My clock is made of glass

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Isagel

(for someone lost last week, far to early. Almost strange, the way your sentence was what I needed to write down. I might need to work abit more on this poem, but there it is)

---

Gets me in the gut a bit, that. I don't mean this in a superstitious way, but this game does seem to pull out meaning in surprising ways. Glad it was helpful to you.