Onestop Poetry - "Octains"

Luke Prater, hosting OSP this week, seeks poems in Octain form.

High Octane Highs

Once you poured Tigers in your tanks.
(A sixties ad. you may recall)
You floored the pedal! What a ball!
A bigger thrill than blinds-down w**ks,
that exhaust boom, that throaty vrooom,
those handbrake turns and wheel-spin pranks
hit three wee girls and killed them all -

Great stuff, those Tigers in your tanks.

Magpie Tales#66

Inspiration this week is found in the library at Willow Manor

Four Five One (*)

When you’ve a mind to burn some books, first, burn

Psocoptera, the bookworms. They can’t run.

For a brief while they suffer, then they pop.

Don’t stop there! Get a taste for burning things.

Turn to the readers. Those who don’t agree

that burning all improper books is good

you’ll make example of by immolation.

Hear how they fizz and crack and shrivel up,

fine punishment for blemished literacy.

Better still to stop the treason at its source.

Go for the writers. Make a bigger pyre.

Herd the public out to smell their smoke,

their shrieks more damning than the words they wrote

that you did not agree with. Don’t forget

what makes a book improper is in your gift.

College, seer and Cardinal only know

heresies. You have the supreme say-so.

Then fan the flames till what’s left on the shelf

is the mindless drivel that you wrote yourself.

(*) The temperature in degrees Fahrenheit at which paper ignites spontaneously.

See Ray Bradbury’s story “Fahrenheit 451”