Crapsey Cinquains
The Crapsey cinquain is a 5-line, non-rhyming, accentual or accentual-syllabic form created by Adelaide Crapsey (1878–1914), inspired by haiku, and popularised by William Soutar (1898–1943). There are several definitions of different levels of strictness.
The simplest definition is that the lines have 1/2/3/4/1 stressed syllables. The next-simplest is the same, except that each line has as many unstressed syllables as stressed onces, so there are 2/4/6/8/2 syllables total. The most complex definition is that the meter must be strictly iambic or trochaic.
There are several variations, e.g. the reverse cinquain and the butterfly cinquain. The reverse cinquain's pretty obvious. For the butterfly cinquain, merge the patterns of two cinquains, one regular and the other reversed, so the syllable pattern is 2/4/6/8/2/8/6/4/2 or 2/8/6/4/2/4/6/8/2. You can also use the cinquain (and reverse cinquain) as the stanza form in a longer poem.
Notes
I've written using a mix of all the definitions except the simplest one, sometimes using both trochaic and iambic in the same poem (switching at punctuation).
As for speaking, I imagine the lines get faster as they get longer, with the longest line taking, say, only twice as long to speak as the shortest despite being four times the number of syllables. Maybe the syllables are shorter, or maybe the shorter lines have pauses. Either way, the overall effect is a slow start, then a rising pace, and finally a sharp cut or sudden slowness.
The form doesn't inherently involve rhyme, but I sometimes find myself adding rhymes, often internal.
Poems
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2026-04-04
In an undiscovered tombI'm born Sky-deep in catacombs anon Where names, like faithful dogs, Curled up at last To die And I, the last— “Anonymous” my name— I wait for history's embrace In vain.
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2026-04-03
Denied The words they need To speak the storm inside, Young makeshift angels hide their shame— Their lust Burns through peephole stars and cheek-red Slashes of sky and sweat Not knowing why, But knowing.
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2026-04-02
Feeling Listless hum-hiss, The tortoise pathologic Winning races left–right–centre Olympic.
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2026-01-27
Famished, The rain-drunk earth Now sweats and salivates And opens up its million mouths And eats. Look there— The hilltop! The trees Disappear.
A Crapsey cinquain with a little extra.
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2026-01-21
Storm reigns Throughout the land— That savage lilac sky Transfixes us with wrathful eye All night.
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2026-01-17
Rise up! Through mist and mud, Mosquitoes out for blood Rise up and taste the sun and feed The birds.
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2026-01-17
Red-hot Horizon slime All seeping through the clouds— Amoeba furnace burning bright Tonight.
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2025-12-31
The year's Midwinter sky Sloughs its rags of cloud, And in its last colossal breaths, Gives birth.
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2025-12-31
Precious Museum-piece, A puddle locked up tight In panes of ice, while docent sylphs Tell lies.
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2025-12-13
Dead Languages Their GamesThe ghosts That live in names— Dead languages their games— Spread gossip in the tongue of flames And wait Calendrical millennia Until some other fish Crawl from the mud And speak.
A bit of a connection to a blank verse couplet I wrote a while back. I also thought about ending this “Until some other race / Crawls from the mud / To speak”, and it started very differently when I first started writing it: “Twelve beasts / That once had names— / Dead languages and games—”.
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2025-12-08
Lost In the library, The claustrophilic cat Contorts themself between the spines And waits Till lantern-head librarians With atlas catalogues Reorder the world In ink.
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2025-11-28
The hole Beneath the Earth Knows nothing of the hands That work the knife, that vivisect Our world, But our chewed-up gristle-Gods know When people pray to nothing, Nothing answers —
I broke off the last bit to create a very short epigram.
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2025-11-25
Each house The last high monument to pain— Each son an epitaph, Father's chisel In hand.
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2025-11-24
We hang Our coats of rain And wander through the rooms, But storm holds court throughout our house Of tombs.
More on the same theme as a haiku from the same day.
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2025-11-21
In fear, The sun retreats Withdrawing all its gifts— Our golden clouds transmute to leaden Rain.
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2025-11-15
Our sky, So tired of life, Now gathers dusty stars And turns a darker shade of black And falls.
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2025-11-05
Standing Eye to eyeless, Only anxious angstroms Separate the desperado From Death Whose angel fingers coax a croak Of cold, serene contempt Before the crook Drops dead.
Some wording shared with a crooked quad from the same day.
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2025-11-04
But God Delays the end, And stays its teasing hand Before the holiest of holy Orgies— Maybe fear of disappointment? The waxy stars won't burn, Our hands won't grasp Its flesh.
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2025-11-01
Haloes Dull and lifeless, Angels shrieking paeans Block the light on European Pogroms.
Similar subject to a crooked quad I wrote the same day.
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2025-10-28
Delinquent RainTonight Delinquent rain Falls up into the sky Defiant, drop by drop, until We die.
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2025-10-27
A cry— Prepare the noose To hang the prince of grief By order of the yellow king, A thief Whose upturned words are absolute And court delights all seem, Beneath the masks, All spite.
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2025-10-25
Gambling on the Bandwagon to NowhereWith whip And cap in hand, The barker–banker leers: “Your doubled nothing gleams like gold, You'll see!” Listen: The screams inside the big-top vault Aren't born from childish glee— Their clowns wear angel Skins.
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2025-10-24
Tonight, The wick that drinks the wine ignites— Your tender citadels Of strange delights Explode.
I also thought about “harsh delights” instead of “strange delights”, since it contrasts better with “tender citadels”. Still not sure on this one.
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2025-10-23
Don't delve The typewriters' ossuary Without an offering Or else they'll take Your teeth.
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2025-10-23
Against The bloody sun, A bannered plague of saints Advances on the ziggurats And preys.
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2025-10-22
Muses Clasp corpse-fast The pen Promethean Whose inks write over rot in living Blues.
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2025-10-19
Let's trace The scrimshawed bones Of better memories— We'll try to build a better world, Won't we?
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2025-10-17
Devo(ra)tion as a moral rightToo deep Inside the game, The anglerfish's lure Alights with rage and blames its prey For its fame And all the darkness, fat with eyes, That light can't drive away— But was this not Your aim?
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2025-10-16
Megastructure Fucks (B)In a haze Of cosmic dust And macroscopic lust The megastructure fucks itself Through us.
Similar subject to another Crapsey cinquain I wrote the same day, but with the opposite sentiment.
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2025-10-16
Megastructure Fucks (A)In a haze Of concrete dust And mechanistic lust The megastructure fucks itself To death.
Similar subject to another Crapsey cinquain I wrote the same day, but with the opposite sentiment.
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2025-10-15
I crew The listening post For the local lightning farm, So let me tell you something strange: God's wife Has lately done the work of Man And killed Him in His sleep— The Devil weeps Forked tears.
Thematically kinda related to a previous Crapsey cinquain, I guess?
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2025-10-10
They drink Effluvium from butchers' shops And belch the facts of life In column inches— Old tripe.
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2025-10-05
Time rusts, And skeletons shall walk the earth In great unnumbered mass And cry for death To die.
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2025-09-29
Windswept GloryFrom far The wind carouses night by night Through border fortresses And distant wars Echo, And private wars In hollow officers Are lost in silent cannonades Of time.
After The Tartar Steppe/The Stronghold by Dino Buzzati.
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2025-09-28
Ignored Beneath the courts, New moralist grotesques And cops recast as bureaucrats Rejoice! Through amniotic sewerworks Their headless king of cons, Leviathan, Gives birth.
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2025-09-27
Young tree, Your “ageless” trunk Was never yours, you know— Old Moss and Fungus now reclaim The weight Of all our black and humid gifts That let you stretch your crown, Your Heaven wide And white.
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2025-09-24
The Rapture DemonBehold! The Rapture Demon climbed from Hell, And all of Christendom That slurs and whines Looks swell.
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2025-09-24
The cat Plays hide-and-seek But vanishes in sleep; A little grief still waits for you Upstairs.
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2025-09-22
The Law: A million roads Encircle and enshrine The Wandering Jew, whose path divines God's Truth.
A kinda Borgesian premise.
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2025-09-22
Our Earth, All planetary golf-course greens— The players richly hate Our sandtrap towns Between.
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2025-09-21
Babble Fills the airwaves, Reaching up and bouncing Round the ancient tower's space Debris.
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2025-09-20
Last Corpse Alive Turns Out the LightsI watch Leviathan crawl on fungal legs, Lapping up the decay Of the soil sea Beneath me, Then haul up its dreadful weight And release its myriad young To the space between The stars.
A kind of asymmetric butterfly cinquain. Adding to the roughness, it's accentual rather than accentual–syllabic. Anyway, I'm not sure whether this is about the total annihilation of humankind or a newly-immortal transhuman or posthuman exodus.
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2025-09-13
Havoc! Our turpentine Cloudprows breach the skywall And bombard Kinkade's fortresses With Dark.
Started from the same place as an oddquain I wrote the same day.
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2025-09-05
Dull husks Of summer suns, Drained by old nostalgia, Hang tangled in the autumn haze, Dead dusks.
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2025-08-28
Pawprints Twinkle coyly In the dawn-damp garden, Laugh at all the constellations, And die.
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2025-08-25
Hear this!Hear this! The master, War, Draws near the City Free Where no-one can agree our right To fight!
Based off the 1937 radio play The Fall of the City.
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2025-08-25
Crooked Light-YearsHe walks A crooked mile, But look beyond the twist— His crooked light-years plot an arc Sublime.
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2025-08-13
Avert your eyes, Sweat fire— All groped by hands of heat Beneath the cataracted sun of Man.
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2025-07-17
Omens Crowd the newborn, Fistfight for the right to crown her doom her or consume her: Last birth.
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2025-06-30
Feeling Coarse and caustic, Making myths and systems Out of broken glass and boiling Acid.
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2025-06-08
Soon tired Of rainbow neon Soho clubs, The in-crowd paints the town In bootshine black Attacks.
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2025-06-06
Feeling Warp-and-weftish, Weaving steel-wire cages For a future where I'm free from Freedom.
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2025-06-02
The 51st State of MindFive feet Of spotless steel— This hood will wear the head Of any passerby who dares defy The truck (Whose windows never face the wind, Whose mudflaps don't know mud, Whose suburbs dress In white).
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2025-06-01
Sound-Booth RomanceAmp up Sound-booth romance, A foley fantasy Where lovers' murmurs sleep in Drawers.
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2025-05-28
Feeling Free and loose-leaf, Risographic layers Slowly making sense together— In you.
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2025-05-22
London Over the HorizonTonight, The dismal blaze Of cottoned sodium— Our cheapskate Götterdämmerung— Repeats.
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2025-05-16
Feeling Stricken benthic, Peering up at lightships Latching on to angels' anchors In hope.
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2025-05-15
Etaoin ShrdluThe shade Etaoin sighs, His tongue of lead too soft To move cold Pluto's iron soul To tears. “To tears!” This psychopomp of ignorance And poisoner of wells Was one more pawn For toil.
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2025-05-13
Jerusalem Revisited“Halal” And “ninja swords” And “voodoo medicine”— Let's keep such violence out of England, Where we wash bloodstains out with blood, We waitlist you from life, We masturbate To death.
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2025-05-09
Feeling Thrum and vesper, Chafe against my tether To a world of midday paper Lifetimes.
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2025-05-05
Surfing In the backwash Of Devourer Europe; Please ignore the bodies, they are normal.
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2025-04-30
We turn a profit on every house built WrongIt wails Beneath the roof— Suburban demonhosts Have caught the spirit of the air For cheap.
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2025-04-30
The nerves An orchestra, Its players out of tune, Yet in their millions, harmonies Of you.
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2025-04-30
I work The starlight shift At Cadaveryard Five— They brought in the body of God And prayed.
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2025-04-25
A chair Alone amid The trees its roots once knew, To boast of all the rich behinds It seats.
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2025-04-24
The Stage, a WorldEnter. Spit on a fate Of playing chorus roles In someone else's one-man show, Or worse, In Act Three of a one-act play, The audience all gone. Exit, pursued by fear.
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2025-04-24
Feeling Far and yardang, Waiting for the winnow; Blow my dust away to cosmic Beaches.
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2025-04-22
Nettle Seeking dock leaf For a dirty threesome Of ankle sadomasochism —Call me
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2025-04-22
Listen: The cold and dark Prepare their rusty knives For when the universe again Makes sense.
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2025-04-22
I saw Their body was A sacred palimpsest Of bad ideas, faith in every Saviour.
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2025-04-22
Fingers With angels' grace Attach to torturers' Throats and sweetly coax a porcelain Stillness.
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2025-04-22
A gift From you to
meyou But through my weary hands— To drudge for your contentment is No gift. -
2025-04-20
Hush dear, A tree just fell, Collapsing every clade Into the singularity Where we, Mother Moss and Father Fungus, Weave a fleshy cosmos Yet no lesser Than yours.
At first I wrote “Gently / Moss and lichen / Nurse the fallen timber / Once so regal, never more to / See stars”, but that just felt weak.
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2025-04-19
Click–flash! The crowd agape, Who stomach any pain; The boxers' kiss will break this egg And fly.
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2025-04-18
Unmet At crossroads foul, The waiting devil sweats— And later he donates the Blues To toads.
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2025-04-18
Emit: The furnace breathes One living smoke and flame— A dryad born, the soot and slag Her name.
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2025-04-12
Old man, Does this thin road, This crooked path of stones, This feeble furrow in the grass, Lead home?
Inspired by various short stories by Dino Buzzati.
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2025-04-10
They shot The preacher's son For treason to his race— At least, that's what the papers said In choir.
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2025-04-10
Feeling Vast and seaglass, Never knowing whether This is it, the chip, the shatter— Green stars.
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2025-04-08
Pebble Beaches freckled With a world's detritus— Can you see the world within a Pebble?
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2025-04-07
NoctilucentLook up: The fishbone clouds Still catch the light of day From half the sleeping world away And swim.
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2025-03-14
You won't learn anything newGood Lord, Please save me from These lurid fever-dreams Of broken empire bubbled up From Hell. And yet, Who doesn't like to see James Bond Outwit a burly goon In paradise Tropic?