Eight-line Poems

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

How to weigh
a life? On what manner of scales could existence be placed to find its weight? The way
becomes the method by which
we demonstrate the absurdity of the task. And this is before we switch
to consider our ability or otherwise to bear
this conundrum, the title having maintained its possibility. If a thing is unbearable, how
         do we survive it? There
appears to be no answer. Quod Erat Demonstrandum (one
way to show off my knowledge of Latin) or, as I prefer it, Quite Easily Done.


Line count: 8 (the indented line is counted as part of the previous line)
Form: Experimental. The idea is that, instead of being bound by meter, I ignore it and concentrate on rhymes within the text, breaking the lines where rhymes occur. Two things become apparent immediately. One is that conscious interference is required to ensure that lines do not become too long (I thought anything more than five or six would be a bit excessive). The necessity to insert intentional rhymes at reasonable intervals, affects the direction the argument takes and how it’s expressed. Secondly, it becomes necessary to ignore near rhymes if the opposite problem is to be avoided - lines being broken too often and making the poem very short indeed. Ideally and if there were no set line limit, any block of text should be capable of this treatment. Is it poetry? Only if the words used are already poetic, in which case it’s defined as prose poetry.
For Express It In Eight, 01.08.24
Prompt: The Unbearable Lightness of Being.