Early Retirement Extreme Forums

This attempt to launch a new topic might be a complete bust, but I like reading poetry, and I'd like a forum for reading other's poetry and publishing some of my own (bad) poetry from time to time. Hopefully there are a few other folks on this forum who are of a like mind as to poetry (I did a quick search and didn't see that this had been attempted before). So, this thread is intended to be a place where you can post ERE-inspired/inspiring poetry--original works or properly attributed works of others.

Here's my first submission (a limerick), which I'd previously posted in my own journal back in August.

Societal decline has me fretting
Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon pervading
My kids train for merit
but the world they'll inher't
St. Benedict for the hills would be running

I just bought a car
Exactly like my old one
Except that it's not

Airlines, retail, oil
Stocks I bought up back in June
What a fucking fool

Two hundred forty
Years of USA progress
Give us THESE two guys?

Yes! Haiku!

I was distancing
Myself from other people
Before it was cool

If you think the world will collapse
Then fall in the usual traps:
A permaculture garden
And a copy of Walden
Obsessed over composting crap

My job makes me fucking complain
So I hopped on the no spending train
With piles of lentils
My friends think I'm mental
'Cause I read a book by a Dane

There once a man from Nantucket
Who composted shit in a bucket
He quickly rewired
His house and retired
To owning a car he said fuck it

Lentils Lentils Bike
Lentils Lentils Lentils Bike
Grok systems theory?

Lentil stew
Few have the stomach to chew
Deciding over the train-test skew
A copy is different from a view
May these word ring true
Wake up with the morning dew
To begin life anew
With or without a beau
No worries of bills due
Reading reports by Research Pew
Playing DIY with super glue
With no literatures remaining to review
Counting 100 reasons why head of Śiśupāla flew
Reminisce when the conch-shell Pāñcajanya blew
Reading poems on how Droṇa was slew

No surprise I can't
Get hired when I am so
Bad at picking stocks

The carboy bubbles
Fermenting goodness inside
Beers for all my friends

For DD:

Chocolate bars for sale
Our fridge is overflowing
Wage slave mindset quash’d

Wasted years at the office abound
But a preferable path I’ve not found
There is virtue in work
But I’m chasing perks
As I dig my own hole in the ground

Turn off the TV
This country is going to shit
Quick! Run for the hills

Here's my attempt at a sonnet / epic poem. Sort of a parody of Beowulf. Obviously, the senseless violence therein contained is satirical and poking fun and epic poems; I certainly do not wish a consumer massacre.

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The Viking Jacob, humbly he is born
Inside a tiny land across the sea
Already viewing egg boilers with scorn
The Viking lad avoids most every fee

The Nordic Man, one day he hears a call
To share his non consumption with the world
That recreational consumers all
Should slaughtered be, with lentil flags unfurled

The Lentil King, he optimizes yields
Consumers of all countries fear his wrath
With dying shoppers in the bloodied fields
Where once stood malls is standing a bloodbath

So please, oh children, please do not forget
This fucking blog upon the Internet

That’s taking it up a notch @RF

Wahl branded hair clipper
Clips his hair astrophysicist Fisker
Clipping coupons not his MO
Catching waves a boat he rows
Guiding followers on ERE Wheaton Table
They quickly cut cable
Chopping wood, carrying water
Eating lentils, saving threequarter

WB Yeats, excerpt from Second Coming (written during the Spanish Flu):

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.