Manticores and Things

Well, where to begin? I suppose I could start with the most recent poem I wrote. But before I do that, let me give you a little backstory.

In January of this year my housemates and I decided to watch 007: GoldenEye. We watched it, and as you may know Janus gets into a boat labelled Manticore. I decided to ask my housemates sarcastically, "Hey Jen, what's a manticore?" They didn't want to play along, so I gave the description of a griffin, and they fired back with, "That's not a manticore! That's a griffin!" Of course I had trapped them. After that I looked up manticore facts on Wikipedia, much to the chagrin of my friends. They had heard enough about manticores.

Fast forward to February and an online friend introduced me to the Which Way Adventure, one of those "choose your own adventure" games in Flash format. Oftentimes the player is given choices of what to do that lead to being surprised and eaten by the manticore. I showed it to a housemate who instantly loved it, and thus the love of the manticore was borne.

Now at the end of February we had a different teacher for one session of the creative writing class I have been taking. He introduced us to the idea of the imagist poem, one where there are no judging or emotive words, simply stated facts about the situation. We read William Carlos Williams' piece about a housecat that climbs over a bookcase. Last time we were in class Joe, a man in my class, questioned how a poem like that could become famous and important in the history of poetry. Our teacher offered up the idea that because the movement of the poem matched the structure, and that poetry at the time of Williams was very romantic, this was groundbreaking.

I decided to try to emulate Williams with this poem I have entitled Manticore. Enjoy.

Manticore

Pointed wings lift
The lion's
Torso

Over
The people
Who run away

Its tail tipped
With poisonous
Barbs

Grinning
Human head
Roars at the

Sky and eyes
The fleeing
Prey

Dinner
For the
Manticore is served