CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

It’s National Poetry Month , and I’m trying to write, and post, a poem a day to celebrate it. So far, I’ve managed to miss two days, proving I’m not super-human after, but only ordinary, average human. Here’s the poem for today, late today, like the rest of today’s tasks, but here, nonetheless. In Romeo’s Wake Written on April 6, 2018, for the February 17 entry of Another 365 Days of Poetry , this piece of fantasy verse was started as part of a response to the first of the 30Days of Writing Activities set by Shut Up & Write . "I’ll see you in the world below," said the age-old Romeo, and with those words he did descend, and left me to on my own defend. I felt jilted, angry, owned, and I vowed then I would not roam to seek a way to the world below, or the treach’rous arms of that Romeo for, although he’d wooed me from dusk til dawn, he’d left me to defend, then mourn, the village, and its dead, alone. If I sought him, t’would not ...

Written for a collection due for release at the end of the year, and shared in honour of National Poetry Month: A Mystery of the Smiling Swamp Written on April 3, 2018, for the February 11 entry of Another 365 Days of Poetry, this fantasy piece is themed with trolls and swamps, and the mystery of a vanished hero. On the shores of the Smiling Swamp the trollman came and saw the livid roiling waters looking like Hell’s maw. In armour made of dragon hide, he came and contemplated the way the waters boiled and shook, until his curiosity was sated. The Smiling Swamp, a beast untamed, a wild land no one controlled, the troll knight stretched, his mind made up. He’d never wanted to grow old. He stood upon the shore and roared, his voice a rolling challenge that echoed through the swampy sward, forshadowing the trollman’s war for a land to be avenged. Blood flows green in the Smiling Swamp, but it flows red as well, and the gas that gives the m...