Raim

I too have wondered, weak and weary, pondered  ‘pon the pisstake theory,

Of self-actualising parody that they’ve come to call Poe’s law,

Which states that forum posts and memes of viewpoints taken to extremes

Can, if cut from context seem, the very voices  they abhor.

 Does it work, too, with parodies you’d find at a bookstore?

Can mimicked metre be made more?

The name’s not claimed, I know, from Eddy, but from Nathan Poe instead, he

Was commenting on a forum on creationism’s flaws

But all the same, the name is fitting, bearing in mind the burlesques written

Which base their borrowed beauties on the Bard of Baltimore.

And can they chime if rhymes, at times, are thrown right out the door.

And if the metre doesn’t stay the same?

The one set trait to which I’m sticking, is the one that Eddy got from Dickens;

Some sources judge Barnaby Rudge, with its raven Grip, who’s tame,

To have provided inspiration for the bird whose tapping brings frustration

To his nicely-wrought nighttime narration by narrator without name.

That cunning corvus corax whose caw “Nevermore!” proclaimed.

That’s the part that stays the same.

Also, that I sit at home, sweating o’er a spectral tome

To derive from its dread demons some poor poetry to proclaim.

With my muse so often fumbling, when on a writer’s block I’m stumbling

That leaves me mute or merely mumbling. “What to write on Raim?”

Till a timid tippy-tapping threw my thoughts from off their train

A tapping on my window pain.

As I rose and drew my curtain, somehow, then, I knew for certain

It was another corvus corax that had to my chamber came

That my misfiring muse had sent there. Lifting the latch I let him enter.

And as with Poe, my poet-mentor, once through my window-frame

The bird had words to share with me, and started to declaim.

Quoth the Raven, “Hi, I’m Raim.”

“It is for me the perfect pleasure, to pinch from kings and princes treasure

I even take their dignity, desiring to defame

 All duxes, dukes and dignitaries, to crush their castles and cities.

A Pope? A Prince? Such folk as these I smear with slanderous shame

As I am angered avidly by status and acclaim.”

Quoth the Raven, “Hi, I’m Raim.”

“I answer all that that I am asked, regarding riddles from the past.

Past, present and future: I find them all the same.

I reconcile both foes and friends, aiding them to make amends

While to those that lust for love I lend my arm to aid their aim

Of setting sparks in lover’s hearts to light up as love’s flame.”

Quoth the Raven, “Hi, I’m Raim.”

He sung me this, his simple song, soared round the room then he was gone

And my sombre, shadowed study by the silence was reclaimed.

It was still late, I was still tired. But maybe now I’d be inspired

To strum upon Apollo’s lyre in a way that wasn’t lame.

And what is more, to me Lenor’s a detergent not a dame

Quote the poet, “That was Raim.”

Neil Rhind was doctored in Literature from Edinburgh in 2009.  His work has been published in The Scottish Literary Review, The International Review of Scottish Studies,  and the International Journal of Scottish Literature and was recently anthologised in Spectral Lines: Poems About Scientists [Alternating Current Press].  He commits Ritually Significant things in Edinburgh, and is into the Fall (season) and the Fall (band) but not the Fall (existential state of Damnation).  Since lockdown, he’s set some verse to visuals on Youtube and published a poetic tarot deck through Amazon, To Read The Tarot.