Three

From the Surgeon-General, a dirge-end of derelict vocation--
"Expunge and impound the light of the sky, the sun.
A sponge of smoke to soak
the illumination dry, from the sun and its sky.
Smoke! And invoke, in general, as the surgeon says and elects,
a carcinogenic death that disintegrates our flesh
and frees our forms from falling, failing fates!"
--on every pack to date.

This poem is basically an ordinance from the Surgeon-General, telling everyone to smoke cigarettes so as to create a cloud of smoke and smog over the city, and so that they, in essence, will reach death faster. It's a message that's on every cigarette pack in the city, and much in contrast to the health warning of the cigarette packs of our own reality.

Two

Mother says to son, who has a grenade in his gut:
"Child, on the morrow I will cradle your marrow.
I will laden it with careful compassion;
neither a sad faction of maudlin mourning
nor a diagram of indifferent retraction from
the Great System that will spread you over the plains.
We have 'til morning-- we have 'til mourning begins.
An evening of weeping and scorning of overt emotion,
of remembrance and nostalgic entrance to meaningless memory and the corrosive motion of time.
Apprehension, and our pension is bestowed grief,
waiting to mourn-- waiting until the morning of the day that you explode.
Your marrow and horror will harrow us tomorrow,
as the black-brittle pin begins to slip
from the death-spittle sheathe within you,
a diagram of destiny's phlegm-- spit and repeat; release so grim.
And while your diagram still pushes for breath,
I will push you to my breast, which will bear the breadth
of the pain; the gory rain;
the reign of glory of the hate and acrimony of fate,
on the morrow, when I embrace your marrow,
steaming-hot and scalding my skin, enacting my sin."
Says mother to son, cries with tears hung
like criminals and convicts on her face,
as she ties him to crucifix, and escapes.
We are a people of mortality, not morality,
and die expertly and the whims of a power impassioned by our suffering.

This poem, once again narrated by the Lacerated Orator, details the role of the mechanical mutations in the lives and existences of the Miscreant people. A child has been born and created with a grenade in his stomach, and it will explode the morning after the poem takes place. The mother of the boy struggles to find a balance of self-control and emotive expression of grief as she speaks one last time with the boy. However, she is overtaken with cynicism, and continues to darkly describe to her son how he will die in the morning, and how she will mourn. Finally, she departs, after tying him to a crucifix of sorts, so that his explosion will do no more harm than is necessary. I think this poem really needs work. It doesn't flow well, has no rhythm, repeats a couple of important words (which I hate to do, in most situations), and fails to get the message and scope of the original idea across to the reader; it fails to execute as well as I want it to. This one will definitely be redone.

One

I am a lacerated narrator,
an orator and oracle of a people deconstructed, who beget transgression,
transmuted, transgressed.
My lips are cut-away so that I may speak without obstruction
at the cost of accuracy.
I am accosted-- an accusatory, obstinate leech of pronunciation,
who, in my profound instigation,
ekes clarity from the clarion that my ever-salivating smile cannot provide.
It is a trophy of the atrophy of speech, my grim grin-grimiore.
My suffering snarls and malformed moans please and permeate,
seize and sickly sate
the malignancy of the sadist surgeon who slew my syllables with scalpel:
slice and sneer, my anesthesia fear.
General! Admiral!
(Restitution, destitution, and avant-garde admiration.)
Thank you, father; frenzied flesh-fouler.
Dark-browed and slanderous, we persist and subsist beneath your smoke-sullen skies.

The speaker of this poem is the Lacerated Orator, the leader of the Miscreants. I think I'm going to have it as his introductory poem, a bitter manifesto of insubordination to the Surgeon-General (the creator and father of the Lacerated Orator, of sorts). My goal was for it to be as vicious as possible, but I'm not sure that it is. Also, the flow and rhythm is a little off, and the whole thing needs to be a little more cohesive. The content itself may need to be adjusted, as well. Right now, it just seems mediocre and contrived. I didn't intend for it to be a final draft, but I wanted to post it so I get back into working on the project as a whole.

I've given some thought to expanding Pedestrian Protection outside of the universe of the Plain Praetorian, and I've decided that I'm going to. I have a project I've been working on for a little while, but I've neglected it for the past month or so, and would like to get back to working on it. Posts that are relevant to it will feature a city symbol.

Right now, I call it "A cityscape.", and I'm hoping it'll turn out to be a collection of poems that narrate everything (and more!) that I'm going to describe next:

A preacher/leader of a religious movement has founded a civilization of sorts within the bounds of a garden that borders a great chasm. This leader, the FORLORN MESSIAH, a necromancer, has created a religion based off of the idea of resurrection. His followers are urged to get through life as quickly as possible-- perhaps advocating suicide-- so that they can be resurrected with the full knowledge of death, thus making them more complete beings. It also allows them to, in a way, circumvent the natural cycle: since death has already taken them once, it has no reason to take them again, giving them a sort of immortality and agelessness.

However, the religion of the FORLORN MESSIAH is corrupted and perverted by one of his disciples, the SURGEON-GENERAL. The SURGEON-GENERAL eventually brings ruin upon the garden and the followers of the FORLORN MESSIAH, disbanding 'church'. On the other side of the chasm, he founds a city of machinery, and begins promulgating a religion of his own. It is much like that of the FORLORN MESSIAH, but without the resurrection. The SURGEON-GENERAL, a sadistic, melancholy, and suicidal being, pushes his followers to seek death as quickly as possible so that life cannot torture them-- but without leaving behind a corpse. Bodies are subject to resurrection, and the SURGEON-GENERAL fears an uprising of the resurrected (he was not able to destroy or eliminate the FORLORN MESSIAH, who now dwells in the sewers/cellars of the city).

Those who survived the destruction of the garden, and those who refuse to follow the SURGEON-GENERAL, make an exodus to the plains beyond the chasm and the city. They find no solace, though, as the SURGEON-GENERAL pursues them with soldiers and war. A brief conflict ensues, and the 'rebels', so to say, and in name only, are defeated and bound/forced to worship a great monument of metal. This monolith 'mutates', again, so to say, the inhabitants of the plains, causing them to be infused and born with metal defects. Such an example is the LACERATED ORATOR, the leader of the oppressed people, who has a razor blade embedded in his vocal chords (and whose lips were cut away by the SURGEON-GENERAL to 'enhance' his ability to orate to the people of the plains).

That's some of the background. As for actual plot and story, I'm not too sure-- it'll be something that involves the return of the MISCREANTS (the people of the plains, who I forgot to name in the last paragraph) and the LACERATED ORATOR, and the eventual destruction of the city and the reinstatement of the FORLORN MESSIAH and his religion, which is irregainable and no longer pure. Or, everyone will just die, or something. Like I said, not too sure.

It's all a bit rough-hewn right now, and (obviously) needs some work and polishing, but my goal with it, however ridiculous and unrealistic, is to perhaps get it published somewhere. If I can up its quality significantly and produce a decent number of poems, that is.

I have a number of poems already composed, so I'll post them intermittently, and will be adding new ones as well.

And that's that. Hopefully something good will come of it all.

(I think I made up a couple of new words while writing this entry. And, in regards to the capitalization of characters, I saw it done in Dante's Inferno, and thought it was really cool. So, now I do the same.)