490 - Fiction bubble - the mask

For the fictional bubble of March 27, 2024, the inspiration must have come from a photo of an object posted by one of the Rainettes on discord. My chosen object being the mask posted by Dark, I first composed a poem comprising stanzas of 4, 3, 5, 3 and 2 lines. (these numbers are true in the Open Office file ; Rainettes is how we are called in that community). 

This entry is long, and includes the English version of the text dating from April 9 and which is the result of work of adaptation from the French version, growing between its initial version on the 6th and small changes to match as best possible between both languages. 

Then comes notes about composition and changes between French to English, and finally the photo of the mask I used for this inspiration. 

The mask

Let's start again. I know that my ancestors were a while belated

fully uncertain upon ordering of my first names. X or Y? Y or eques at the beginning?

After their back and forth, I know they chose the X, followed by the Y, but hyphenated

except that unity wasn't achieved, not between them, nor between me and my person without fixed name calling.

Two first names, a last name, then another name, family name I mean by this.

Spending years with this skull mask, to others obscure,

but felt heavily within me.

Wandering between each identity, I followed the traces of the body which sailed hit-or-miss.

Crossing cities and countries, I accumulated mine, ours, these many a-nomenclature

All these people formed in this body, so many necessary facets to befit them like a tee.

None stuck to my skin, not at all, not even approximatively.

In fact, the X-Y, Magalie-Virginie-Cindy-Lucie form an inseparable whole in coherence,

of strokes and other punctuations, first consecutively,

followed by trials, like clothes in the fitting room, with elusive appearance.

Multiple shocks experienced such as accidents without an airbag

fragmented what should have remained a person in a single component.

A first break at too tender an age, this infanticide

committed by the infamous reptile, repudiating the scratched corpse in a barrel of acid.

The investigation is still looking for clues, Sherlock's magnifying glass is absent

and the modern tool to analyze and dissect everything, but it displays defrag.

***

The forensic doctor examines the remains, bending over its substances in such adjacency,

estimates the victim's age to barely 3 years old, the criminal atrocity grows dire.

His eyes bulging, the expert is stunned in front of a red-brown egg, and without latency,

human morphology immediately gives way to a bird of lava and fire.

His autopsy of chimeras evaporated in a cloud of smoke,

the pathologist, now deprived of traces to study, sends an incoherent repor't.

The police closes the case, believing it pure invention of a bored practitioner.

At a distance from the lab, the ashes take on human, featherless cloak.

The dull-eyed child grows crooked, wearing the mask of mort,

not so illusory, a decomposition in the inner fort, in her hearth's core.

The little Cindy became the center of discord between Cyrus and the gardener.

The second fracture followed when crocodile stole our bird, de-winged and in cage.

No doctor could guess that she was barely five years old at the beginning of an ice age,

of embalmed emotions, the Epoch of irons, blinders and tangled infections.

The light foreign to the heavy eyelids, the bird swallowed fabrications

poisoned and narcotic tales à la Nineteen-eighty-four, far from her cradle and rank

Her soporified memory disfigured, she lived in anemic virtual reality

monotonous seasons with gray tones, and while Cyrus crumbled her, Magalie's infancy

followed her astonishment under the fire of the assault tank.

The episode's end display 'to be continued' while the mask crumbles into sponge hallucinations.

***

My construction  - in French - rhymed in ABAB, and during the extension sessions I was able to add enough lines and change the order of stanzas, to reach the sequence of rhymes in CDE CDE, FG FG, HIJ JIH.

check this text : 

My initial compositon of this poem comprised stanzas of 4, 3, 3, 4 and 2 lines, and during my extensions,the end result was divided in two segments, each of 4, 3, 3, 4 et 6 lines, rhyming in the following format ABAB CDECD EFGFH HIJJIH  (repeated again ABAB CDE CDD EFFG GHIIHG). 

Adapting into English was very hard – more than I'd imagined when I chose my French rimes. The end result in English, which caused slight rewriting on my original text gives a different structure, in number of lines and also the rimes  – some of which are approximative, such as infanticide & acid, where in French they have the same sound (like seed) where in English we miss that – unless we stress an accent on either words to match the other.

A further example is the proximity but not a full rhyme between (virtual) reality, and infancy; that last stanza was the hardest portion of the entire poem, simply because of cross-referenced synonyms, expressions and the like just wouldn't rhyme and adding words would either change the overall meaning too much, or force a complete rewriting of the French text – possible both, as well as altering my original rhymes into a whole different construction.

As for report/mort/core, I wrote repor't with the ' on purpose, to force dropping the t sound ; italized the mort to pronounce it as in French (the t's silent), and thus the actual sound I utter is repor/mor/cor. 

Polyglots can compare with the evolution of my French versions of this poem on my other blog. 

And finally, here is the famous mask, already partly seen in the image for this blog entry - I publish with permission.