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WordOfChen β Dark Sadistic Muse:
Published: 2013-03-21 17:26:31 +0000 UTC; Views: 14774; Favourites: 552; Downloads: 0
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Dark Sadistic Muse:I seat myself before the computer,
With fingers poised over fading keys.
Eagerly awaiting my latest epic;
Yet frozen by a lack of inspiration.
Here I sit, staring at the blank document.
The dark background mirroring the world behind me.
I swallow hard as my body locks;
Hairs tense as I sense her arrival...
Slender fingers soon wrap themselves around my throat.
With claw-like nails digging in painfully,
They prick the skin that lies just beneath my Adamβs apple;
Leaving me nursing a rather painful necklace.
"Your hands aren't moving," she coos softly,
Her clawed fingers gently stroking my chin.
"Why is that, I wonder?" she asks with a grin.
Her expression reveals a pair of pointed canines,
Both framed by lips as seductive as sin.
"I'm sorry my lady", I whisper in reply.
The excuse tumbles slowly from a paralyzed tongue.
"I have had no inspiration you see;
No dreams with which I am able to write."
She laughs at this; cruel and cold,
Tossing me from her grasp with eyes of disdain.
She paces the room slowly, with a silent snarl,
Reminiscent of predator, stalking her prey...
"I think you forget, my dearest man,
That you and I have a rather hefty bargain."
I swallow as she speaks, my lips cracking
They turn dry as I mutter excuses and apologies;
"Of course I remember", I reply with a quaver;
Drawing on the tiny wellspring of courage within me.
I spit with a hint of defiance, "would I even be allowed to forget?"
With sudden violence, she hurls me to the ground.
Making stars explode before me, as I am pinned with a stiletto.
She looks down upon me and smiles -
Merciless even in her expression.
"What you have written thus far, 'poet',
Is but a gaunt pittance of what you originally owe me!
Forget not your benefactor and ensure that your hands keep moving.
Or else..." She leans in close; letting me taste her fragrance.
"Else I shall have to be chopping these off now."
And with that she was gone. Vanished from this world,
Leaving me cold and drenched in a pool of sweat.
I was panting for air; gasping as though asphyxiated.
Comfortably alone in this room of mine:
Yet still, frantically typing...
So tell me my friends, if of course you find yourself capable -
What does your muse tend to say about you?
-Chen Yuan Wen, 21st March 2012
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Comments: 112
Wow, wonderful. I felt your muse and saw the scene where she comes in, tantalizes you with terror, reminds you of the due you must pay, and then disappears. You kept it nice and sweet, informative, and also showed the people a part of an author's torture.
You made us ask 'What are our muses like?' And soon, many people were able to place a face to their own muse. You brought a part of an author's process to life and light.
Splendid work, and I love your style in this poem.
I hope your muse won't take you away before your debt is repaid, and before you could write more insightful poems into the life of any painter/drawer/writer.
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There are days when you're sitting down, paper/laptop in front of you, hand/hands on your pen/keyboard, and all the world's ideas are ready to flow out and form beautifully-placed words of art. Other days, however, feel like a famine had blazed into your mind. Absolutely nothing there, not one drop of creativity. Which is why we look those our muses, the little voices in our head who speak our minds and ideas into eligible words. Yet they may not always be the nicest chaps you'll meet...
Chen's poem, Dark Sadistic Muse, is a frightening look into the psychic of one such writer (himself) as his own muse comes to life and shows the true meaning of "tortured artist". You can feel the tension right away as the "femme muse-le" approaches:
"Here I sit, staring at the blank document./The dark background mirroring the world behind me./ I swallow hard as my body locks;/Hairs tense as I sense her arrival..."
And when she arrives, the adjectives to describe her gave me enough shivers to last through two weeks:
"She laughs at this; cruel and cold,/Tossing me from her grasp with eyes of disdain/She paces around the room slowly, with a silent snarl,/Reminiscent of predator, stalking her prey..."
You can feel the evil with every word she speaks, and you can feel the terror of the poet; the one who is to give him inspiration makes him feel more blackmailed than anything. The dynamic between the two comes out violent, and you wonder what sort of deal he made that would allow the muse into his life. The final question he asks is frightening, because not only could this thing be real, but she could be yours as well.
Brr, I need some hot cocoa to warm up. It suddenly got freezing in my room. This latest poem by the Captain is quite bone-chilling, and you the reader might relate to it well. Well done, Captain, and keep writing!
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My deepest thanks for the critique my friend ^^
-Captain Chen of the Black Fedora Pirates
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love the length of vocabulary. Everyone has a different kind of muse. I feel sorry for you. Your's is cruel. but i admit mine changes her personality each time. like a bi-polar godess bestowed from hell, yet with a beauty of a Hummingbird's feather.
But, you could try making more sense of what was happening. like for instance, what was the "bargin" and what did the cruel, demon muse look like? Did the fact that she was a cruel woman mean you were to write a poem unpleasant? Be a little more clear. Be wary, a muse is powerful. Goodluck.
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Those questions are left open for the reader to interpret. For all we know she could be a demon ;3
Clarity is good in some poems, but the feeling of mystery is necessary otherwise readers might not want to read more ^^
-Captain Chen of the Black Fedora Pirates
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oh okay. keep up the great work!
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Thank you friend ^^
-Captain Chen of the Black Fedora Pirates
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My muse is evil, fucked up, and always wanting attention. Β The relationship is that, he gives me great ideas I can twist and turn into something else, but the problem is that he wants everything to be about him, everything. Β Dude is an attention whore with a hidden sadistic side and I gotta babysit that shit all the time. Β
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My Muse is beautiful, but hurts me kindly. She could tear me up and break me down with a single glance. But the strangest part is, she knows not this frightening power she holds over me...The power I let her have to rule my life, my hopes and dreams, and, most of all, my heart.
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She has found a new pet :S and ignores me completely :S
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Yes, yes, yes. Creativity can be a heartless bitch.
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This is chilling and beautiful all at the same time. Sometimes a muse like this is exactly what we need...someone to kick us out of our comfortable excuses.
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This actually inspired me to write a quick short poem of how I view my Muse. I'll have it up and link it to here so you can see what you inspired
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Here it be Lad [link]
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Geeze, your muse reminds me of my alter ego. She was my Muse's best friend...
My Muse is experiencing a period of extreme happiness because I'm going to write a horror book in which people die for April Camp 'WriMo... My Muse ate a lot of inspiration. She's fat now. *shame*
Still.... wow. Such memories of my alter ego... I miss her.
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My muse went to a long vacation and rarely come back to visit me.
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I loved it and wish i could right like you can but we all have our special ways of writing. Your muse was felt with the words in which you used and i felt pure evil and sin but i absolutely love this write and all of your other writes. This one is amazing
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I have two muses, if that is even possible. One of them is an innocent girl who is always nice and the other is a boy who has no respect for authority. He's always sneaking up on me then yelling in my ear, while the girl is shy and I can barely hear her. Is this normal? Wait, scratch that, I'm not normal
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Mine's a finicky, moody preteen that I can never get to sit down for more than couple minutes at a time. Hence, part of why I haven't produced anything yet....
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She tells me to keep moving, despite my difficulties. Promises of a grandeur future, of better things to come.
Yet here I am, still not doing anything.
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I've never thought on the form of a muse. This is an interesting, and intriguing interpretation. Well made, sir.
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I'm reading through the comments and seems most people have a personified muse, an actual person in their head with a name and a personality and everything that makes a person, and I don't. They sound like characters from a story, but not what makes me run to a pen and scribble something down at the most random time. I don't know what makes me run to a pen and scribble something down. I haven't labeled it, I haven't named it and I haven't personified it, even though I've been writing for as long as I can remember. I don't know where inspiration comes from, but for me it's not one character or person.
I do think, however, it is fickle, because it can leave me for weeks and I won't be able to write anything good and then it will turn up in the middle of the night when I'm trying to sleep or when I'm desperately trying to study for exams. But without it I wouldn't be able to write, so I'm not complaining. When I get something stuck in my head however, it has to get out and until then it is impossible to concentrate on anything else.
It doesn't mean I don't have characters in my head, but they are bound to my stories and not the muse in general. The muse is the inspiration, the thing that creates the writing and isn't bound to anything. And I have absolutely no idea what it is, but I hope it never leaves me.
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I, for one, decided to personify my muse on the spot. I'd never thought about it before, and it sounded like an interesting idea. I have a feeling that many other people here did the same.
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I think that if I did that, I'd drive myself insane. I would be giving it a voice and I doubt it would be a nice one. Too much chaos in my head I think. Leaving it for what it is works best for me, but I can understand why it would work for others.
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My muse ran away screaming four years ago and hasn't come back ever since.
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When I saw this in the DDs this morning the first thing I thought of is there ARE others out there like me! I thoroughly enjoyed this work. You are very talented and as long as you are able I hope to be able (if the muse allows that is) I hope to see more like this.
My muse is a mousy little creature that constantly argues with my other two selves and is constantly on "break".
Thank you for sharing this personal insight.
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It's so interesting, to see what kind of muses people have...
Mine is that bad relationship that harms you in the long run, while at the same time it's too intoxicating for you to let go. She possesses me in sleep and waking, weaving chains of words around my mind that tie my hands to the keyboard with their irresistible urge to be written. She's not forceful, or evil: she doesn't need to be. She is the kind of muse that seduces me into writing without eating, without sleeping, because the pleasure of writing is too sweet and too addictive to let me do anything else. She hands me the seeds of miracles and wakes the seething desire in me to nurse them into bloom, all the while watering them with my own life. I know I waste hours, days, years in places of dream where time stands ever still, and that I'm held prisoner by imagined people that leech their life from me. And yet I stay with them, because that's where miracles grow.
Sometimes she makes a star fall down on me. I see the bright light from afar, see it come rushing towards me from realms beyond human senses, and feel it explode with clarity and mind-rending excitement when it hits. And I thank her with hitching breath as I whip out pen and paper on a cold January train station and scribble away for dear life while the dancing words of light still burn at the back of my eyes.
Sometimes she brings me to the top of the world and shows me the vastness below, shows me how all the loose ends come together and points out the intricate, beautiful patterns they form: like a delta landscape where all rivers comes together into one, and all the coincidences I had written blindly from her dictation bind together into divine geometry. And she makes me feel like God.
I hear no words from peoples' mouths, I see no images when I watch a tv-screen: my mind is in the caressing hands of my muse, being moulded for new enterprises she has planned for me. She chains me up with pleasure, carves the waking world hollow with the visions of another, and I willingly take her hand when she whispers, smiling, into my ear that there is more yet to see. And I write more, I write longer; write until the sun rises and write until either my pen or my wrist breaks.
Thank you for writing such an inspiring, interesting poem. My muse liked it.
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My muse will leave for long periods of time, but come back at the most random of times. He's generally rather cooperative and polite, yet he gets whiny when my inspiration is gone... He also comes at the most inappropriate of times. In a math test, "Miss... Could you draw this for me? That math looks awfully boring..."
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My muse is more mysterious, and fickle as hell. She's not really scary, but she is a little...weird. She shows up at random, pesters me intently, and then vanishes when I would prefer she stay.
I think she's in league with my cats.
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Ha, my muse is something like my only OC; Volare. He's dealing with some kind of multiple personality disorder, I fear. He's not very... punctual, either. Turns up at random, extraordinarily inconvenient times. Wonder if it does that on purpose. On one hand, he's this hopefully, cheery thing, but on the other, he tends to yank the dark recesses of my mind out into the open. Quite a twisted thing, just like me.
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I found this by chance, but not regret it at all, because this is an extraordinary piece of art, so real and intense, one can easily imagine the scene and feel the author's fear and paranoia. Really stunning piece of poetry.
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I LOVE THIS!!!! It is brief but lasting, with great poetic vocabulary and of course the creepy paranoia. very inspiring as well. I enjoyed reading this *faves*
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my muse would be. the darkness that hides in the light. always poking its head at me. great work. and i think i will buy it now.
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This is wonderful!
And reminds me a bit of a conversation a character of mine had with me not too long ago when I wasn't writing as I should be.
I suppose he's sort of my muse. He's always there to berate me or comfort me when needed. Most of the time though it's to berate me and bully me.
All in all---I really enjoyed this!
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My advice would be to run away as far as possible but she'd probably find you.
She is bloody scary.
I don't have a muse per se;since I draw and write, I tend to have my characters talk to me. But when I have to go and sew for conventions, they can get really bored and not talk to me for days even when I'm ready. So imagine a half elfin acrobat and a nearly 7 foot tall giant of a man in major sulk mode.
That makes one look really foolish when on a train with the open computer waiting for something to start.
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Eh, my muse wants my head on a pike at the moment... She's evil, conniving, sarcastic, with a good taste in music. Pure evil at this moment because she comes and goes, leaving me with more story ideas than I know what to do with.
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Oh yes. This is brilliant! Every damn word, the concept, the imagery !! I saw her, i felt her, I really enjoyed this, it left me excited 
Good work x
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My muse? My muse is quite a strange creature...Never knowing what it wants me to do. One moment it is quite fearsome and cruel, and others it is as innocent as a baby. Either way, it tends to give me the silent treatment every other week.
Beautiful piece, like always, Captain; the emotion was flawless and I certainly do not want to meet your muse...Or maybe I do >:3
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My dear muse is but a little fox, happily living its life among the thoughts that litter my brain. Some times he likes to sit upon an idea and watch it change and shift to life, fascinated by the many turnings and whirls that it makes. Most of the time, however, he jumps from one idea to the other, leading me astray, unable to truly write.
Whether he is evil or good. I dare not say. For he belongs to me, does he not? And I AM the source of all my stories, lovely and happy as well as dark and suffering, am I not?
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Oh how my friend and I love playing with muses. Most of our stories are based on the muses themselves and the worlds they live in, aka our heads.
This one belongs to me. Yes, gave him a plz account. I'm weird like that. ^_^;
Oh, and he has kids. How many muses actually have kids? XD
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My muse is bipolar. :3
Occasionally, she's a gracious benefactor, and allows me to write fluff and happy stuff, ends up pleased with anything I type up--- simply because I almost never write it.
Most of the time, though, she encourages the darkness and suffering. Because that tends to be easy to think up, what with my strange, twisted mind. It's odd because I really do support peace and love and stuff, but half my writing is so dark you wouldn't believe that I'm typically very cheerful. Or maybe she just wants the cheer to hide the inky black that waits inside, reaching out when called and leaking into stories and poems...
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My muse is an unfortunate by-product of my imagination, who managed to blackmail me into creating an entire personality for him. Now he sits in my chair, drinking my coffee, and gloating over his glorious domination while I sit on the cold floor and type my fingers to the bone.
Love yours, btw.
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My muse is a giant shape shifting mass of colors. Not just rainbow, ALL the colors. She has a few specific forms that she sometimes takes, but otherwise whatever, from bubblegum pink unicorn to a black bleeding emu.
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