“The burned hand teaches best,” they say
But my whole hands are *burned away.*
What lesson learned? I have to laugh
And now go down a different path.
As a bard, I rhyme. I sing.
So words are really quite my thing
To best reclaim communication?
I make this Talon take dictation.
(The dead bard grasped her Talon tight,
The dead bard woke her sleeping soul
From eyeless sockets burned a light
From the bard’s un-flesh-ed-skull
Sound issued forth:
(now don’t complain,
twould take an epic to explain
How she speaks sans vocal chords,
Stolen novel; please report.
just roll with it, adoring hoards,
and do not ask quite how a scroll,
a parchment and magic pen
appears from nowhere to record
the deathles words- let’s go, again.)
TALON WAKE,” the Bard commanded
“DICTATION MODE” the Bard did say
then she paused. What should she write
Her mind was blank, words fled away.
Dictation mode, she told herself,
is dearest to my barding heart
A small and simple set of commands
To just write down my poet’s art
That’s what Dictation Mode is for
commands for writing, at it’s core.
But…what to write?
(Not too surprising, not at all
that bones sans brain should quickly lock
When faced with pressure to perform
and have a bit of writer’s block)
I’m here to learn! The dead bard thought
There’s no one here to look with pity
And learning’s play, so play with it
And so she spoke a silly ditty
As I was going to Saint Ives NEWLINE
(The Talon scribbled out the phrase, then obeyed NEWLINE’s commands, and jumped down one line upon the scroll
as the NEWLINE word demands)
I met a man with seven wives PERIOD NEWLINE
(The Talon heard the PERIOD,
and recognized the punctuation,
placed a dot right after ‘wives’
To make an accurate dictation)
Each wife had seven sacks PERIOD NEWLINE
Each sack had seven cats PERIOD NEWLINE
Each sack had seven kits PERIOD NEWLINE
NEWLINE
Kits COMMA cats COMMA sacks COMMA, and wives COMMA how many were going to saint ives QUESTION MARK NEWLINE
And so the bard did then inscribe
the ancient silly riddle
and she saw, dissatisfied,
mistakes there in the middle.
St. Ives was not capitalized
Nor ‘saint’ abbreviated
And in her bones that held her soul
She felt quite a bit frustrated
Nor did she know how to go back
and fix the odd mistake
but she was feeling tired now,
and so, sanity to keep
She told herself
“That’s five commands,
and for today I’m done
i’ll spend the rest fooling around
and go out having fun.
TALON SLEEP
the bard commanded
and gave Talon a rest
and went off to do the silliness
that silly bards do best.