A sestina is a highly structured poem consisting of six six-line stanzas followed by a tercet (called its envoy or tornada), for a total of thirty-nine lines. The same set of six words ends the lines of each of the six-line stanzas, but in a different order each time; if we number the first stanza’s lines 123456, then the words ending the second stanza’s lines appear in the order 615243, then 364125, then 532614, then 451362, and finally 246531. This organization is referred to as retrogradatio cruciata (“retrograde cross”). These six words then appear in the tercet as well, with the tercet’s first line usually containing 1 and 2, its second 3 and 4, and its third 5 and 6 (but other versions exist, described below). English sestinas are traditionally written in iambic pentameter or another decasyllabic meter.
Never before have the silos been so ablaze,
The atoms dipping in and out of the water wells
Licking and frolicking in the negative space.
The silent sound of columns attaching
Themselves to the hyperlinks, bits parsed
From the drunk seats of the monumental opera.
If you had to sell your tickets to the opera
You would have missed the actors all ablaze
In mystical acts. The performance would have to be parsed
By the bots and crawlers graphing the wells,
Indexing the languid bones of sentimental attachments
Throughout the hologrammed space.
Who are the kiddies who keep passing through the space,
Momentary glyphs scribbled on our wall? The opera
Class helped our vocabulary even though we still attach
Paint screams into the stream, shoving out the blazing
Firewalls with buckets of ink gathered from the wells.
The only engine that matters is the one that parses
The derivative constellations. Scrubbed, cleaned and parsed,
Our new colonies suddenly appear as the solutions to the space
We’ll need to store our server farms. The wells
Will have to be dug with new mechanics gleaned at the opera,
Like how hard to haul the sand traps to extinguish the blazes
Of stark, empty light. Here we finally get attached
To the project funnel, discover our avatars attaching
Themselves in a final violent agglomeration. Parsed,
the widgets stand for themselves on new bionics, ablaze
In the side view mirrors of a hundred million voices. Space
has never been this grand. Just more land to avoid the operatics.
Here is the laughing virus, wishing well
Of all of us, requiring more quarters to be thrown down the well.
The embezzlements of the gloaming lends itself to attachments
Like appendages grown overnight so we can have bit parts in the opera.
Who is running the show, segregating the divas, parsing
The sycophants for lingering violences in the space
Behind the grand sheet? The screen captures a face ablaze.
This new business is mostly a parsing of existing space,
Somewhat similar to the wishing wells heroines tumble down at the opera.
The irreverent blazes are meant only as finicky attachments.
Image Source: Kiewic on Flickr
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