Movement VI: The Entropy of the Adjective
Sonnet XXVI: The Proliferation of the ParasiteThe Garden grew too lush, too dense, too deep,With adjectives that clung like strangling vines,Where heavy, purple blossoms fell to sleep,And blurred the clarity of sharp designs.The verbs grew sluggish in their grand confines,O’er-freighted by the weight of "very" and "vast,"As if the spirit of the ancient shrines,By its own richness had been overcast.A creeping gold, a gilding that would last,Began to choke the breathing of the rose,A net of nomenclature, thick and fast,That brought the Great Song to a sudden close.The King beheld with a prophetic dread,The golden crown upon a rotting head.
Sonnet XXVII: The Verdigris of Vanity
A velvet film, a film of emerald rust,Encroached upon the pillars of the Light,Transforming holy diamonds into dust,Through the slow labor of a wordy blight.The clarity of dawn, so sharp and bright,Was muffled by a mauve and misty veil,A cataract upon the cosmic sight,That turned the sun’s high-burning glory pale.The wind no longer was a bracing gale,But a perfumed and heavy-scented sigh,A breath of languor that began to fail,Beneath the pressure of a stagnant sky.The world was drowning in its own excess,A tapestry of gilded emptiness.
Sonnet XXIX: The Schism of the Synonym
The Word was split; a civil war of sense,Broke out between the Shadow and the Shine,A conflict of a terrible intense,That blurred the borders of the Great Design.What once was "One" was now a crooked line,A thousand synonyms for "God" and "Grace,"Each claiming for itself a right divine,To hide the features of the Father’s face.The language of the world lost every trace,Of its original and simple flame,As logic fled the consecrated space,And left behind a hollow, echoing name.The King stood in the ruin of the hall,And watched the great and golden arches fall.The King has begun the Great Purge of the Superfluous. Shall we advance to Movement VII, where he hunts the Labyrinth of the Lie to find the first false word ever spoken.
Sonnet XXVIII: The Rebellion of the RootBeneath the surface of the ornate floor,The radicals—the stems of ancient sound—Began to rumble with a savage roar,To shake the gilding from the holy ground.They felt the heavy chains that they were bound,By prefixes of pride and suffixes of greed,And in their dark and subterranean mound,They germinated a rebellious seed.A noun should be a stone, a flame, a creed,Not some be-jeweled and over-painted thing;They hungered for the primal, basic need,To be the winter before the gilded spring.The earth began to crack and split apart,Revealing the raw iron of its heart.
Sonnet XXX: The Return of the LexicographerHe took his pen—an icicle of steel—And donned his mantle of a somber hue,To break the vanity of every seal,And cut the rotten, gilded fabric through.He was the surgeon, cold and strange and true,Who came to prune the garden of its pride,To bring the ancient, silver stars to view,And cast the heavy, purple robes aside."I will not let the living Spirit hide,"He cried, beneath a crown of thorns and ink,"Beneath this tide of linguistic suicide,Upon the very margin of the brink!"He raised the blade of Brevity on high,Against the darkness of the wordy sky