PLAYING WITH MARKDOWN CODES | POETRY: FORGOTTEN

PLAYING WITH MARKDOWN CODES | POETRY: FORGOTTEN | Ecency

_{Photo by Larm Rmah on Unsplash.}

FORGOTTEN

What have we become? Silent shadows standing,
Waiting for something to be,
For prayers to become miracles,
For some sort of pat On our shoulders saying; Match on, it's going to be fine? But we do not really know What it is we seek, Or who we truly are, do we?

This air leaves us breathless As we fall , Like broken angels Shimmering like a mirage, Like something unsure Of its own existence , Like a slowly descending leaf That has lost itself In the wind for too long And doesn't know the way Back home.

We do not know The name for pain So we call it father, Husband, boyfriend and friend. We have forgotten how To remember scars , So we have named them
Love bites, scratches,
And feverish kisses. We cannot name depression, So we call him meditation,
Alone time, tiredness, rest.

In this place, Where truth is a lost cry, Crushed throat suffocating
Around the brutal hands of need, How do we rise ? How do we find ourselves,
Remember our names And the names of things? For we have forgotten even Our own names
And all we remember is You.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

This is my second time experimenting with the poem within a poem style. If you follow poetrymano on instagram you will know of the redacted style of creating poetry. I know it has more formal name, this style, but it is 4:44am in the morning and it is cold. Absolutely not a conducive environment to start thinking of the name of a writing style and I absolutely detest using google to find stuff like this.

Anyway, the style involves redacting words and sentences from a text and in that manner create new sentences and meaning. Redaction on its own, is popular among government ran security agencies who think certain information are not suitable for public consumption and as a result, they tend to black out certain phrases, sentences, paragraphs and words from documents which they consider sensitive.

Since I could not redact words here, I decided to create the experience and at the same time give us a poem within another poem. I think the visual experience is awesome and the possibilities for deriving meaning is endless. The poet can play with words and meaning in more ways with this technique. I will call this technique the Steemwarping technique for the sake of fun. 😂

I first used this technique in an old poetry post, MY NIGHTMARE. In this poetry piece, I focused more on creating images with markdown and words but you will still see a little of the steemwarping technique.

THE CODING

To achieve the steemwarping technique, I made use of several markdown codes. You can see it from the screenshots below. Take notes of the codes and the spacing. This is very important.

_{Take note of the markdown code at the beginning of the first line.}

_{Take note of the markdown code at the end of the stanza.}

If you miss a single code, something will go wrong and sometimes it won't be something you'd be quick to identify, so go through the editing again and again until you are sure.

It may seem to be too much trouble but the end result is worth it and it's poetry. Well that is how I create my steemwarping technique.