Septolets

The septolet is a modern 7-line, word-based form with two stanzas depicting two related subjects. The stanzas can be any size as long as their combined lines add up to 7 and their combined words add up to 14.

Notes

Septolets are good for messing with linebreaks and larger breaks, since they're required in such a small format. However, I sometimes find the requirements a bit stifling—there are poems here that'd probably be better with a looser form.

For a while I mistakenly applied another rule, which is that the two parts need to each have 7 words (they don't; the 14 words can be divided any way between them).

Poems

  1. 2026-04-05

    Far sun
sees all,
cares none.

Wind
fumbling
the braille of your face
understands.

    Similar subject but different outcome to a rictameter poem from the same day.

  2. 2026-01-20

    The hinterland skulls
spent all their words
on winning
and losing.

…silence
	rules
		the plains…

  3. 2026-01-04

    Above white-washed cliffs,
we offer up
just
words.

Below,
our ferment
rots the firmament.

    This started off as a two-stanza Crapsey cinquain contrasting on the one hand a people willingly numb to war, Leviathan above white English cliffs, and Hobbes' war of all against all, and on the other hand the world below (seen as churning slime by those above), in reality the firmament above reflected in dark waters where the celestial mechanisms spell everyone for everyone. I couldn't get it down in a way I liked, so I stripped it down to something more straightforward. I might go back and see what I can do with the original idea—maybe something in prose?

  4. 2025-12-19

    Angels and devils
rage throughout heaven,
but…

The
cosmos
drowns
in streetlights and sirens.

  5. 2025-12-17

    At
world's
end,
they harpooned the sun.

Dead red light
gave birth
to darkness.

  6. 2025-12-13

    Salamanders heave-ho
beneath the cauldron
in God's
bonestrewn kitchen.

Apocalypse
ferments
above the hearth.

  7. 2025-12-08

    If you use text-to-speech software, the poem above is silent, because there was no easy way to structure it in HTML (unlike a previous septolet with unusual structure). The poem's text reads as follows: “Ghost leaves fall up to their weeping creators— / All lovers reunited in longest night.”

  8. 2025-11-03

    The river
	flows
like smoke
from
untended flames.

Embers hit the banks,
becoming words.

    Took a little HTML to get the third line to read right while having the right underlying text for TTS. Anyway this started vaguely inspired by an early part of Sleep Has Her House.

  9. 2025-10-25

    Great patriotic
hams
and servile, trussed-up
saints
conscript pig legions.

Butchers mop
with flags.

  10. 2025-09-06
    Labour and Birth in the Land of the Sunset

    You satisfy
our nationwide
necropolytic septic tank
till
it
bursts.

Blood and night soil!

  11. 2025-07-12

    They didn't have
rain before the Flood.

Just
pitter-patter
and tep-tep-tep-tep
and ssssssssss
unremembered.

  12. 2025-06-17
    The Miracle

    The roadkill,
more lively after death.

Fat maggots
and foolish
hands
perform
the miracle.

  13. 2025-06-08

    A blind
streetlight
plays solar idol
to an auditorium
of whispering leaves.

Dawn
falls.

  14. 2025-05-28

    Tree stumps,
weather-worn,
so
full
of cold forgiveness.

The chainsaw's
at the dentist.

  15. 2025-05-13

    Infinite
oily hues
cascade from the gigatanker.

Banal suits
profess
the evil
of rainbows.

    Took a recent fragment forwards.

  16. 2025-05-10

    Lilies-of-the-valley,
tolling for trees.

Grimacing,
a dryad
revs
a stolen
chainsaw.

    Treating all four parts of “lilies-of-the-valley” as separate words since they're not just affixes.

  17. 2025-05-10

    Anti-archaeologists
find false
futures
in the past.

The Futurist
zoetrope man
spins himself apart.

  18. 2025-05-04

    You glare
so
hard
at
me.

Tar drips down the wall
behind the mirror.