A chessboard confesses

A chessboard confesses

I see you gazing at the squares

Composing this fine chequered board.

Tarry not long here lest your stares

Consume more than you can afford.

I’m not deserving anyone

Who seeks to spend their time with me.

Though seen as if a game for fun,

I bring despair and misery.

Parents keenly send their children

To learn and study, deeming worth;

How quickly I then smother them

And pollute their innocent mirth.

Is this some specific malice,

Harshly borne for earnest young minds?

Sadly, it’s my normal purpose,

Any gifted prodigy finds.

I will not judge by any means,

Nor apply some unfair measure.

My torments will equally tease

With promised cerebral pleasure.

You linger still, despite my words,

Understanding I’ll give you pain?

Feel quite free to embrace my curse;

Forewarned, please then enjoy your game.

This should be in a blog! It's good!

Thanks man, just scribbled it at work in a quiet moment.

Beautiful Poem. 

You know; this one spoke to me a bit. Glad to know I am not the only one that has noticed that chess often brings as much frustration and pain ( especially when you aren't doing well at it) as it does pleasure. At times I wish that someone had warned me about that fact when i was first learning to play; other times, I am glad that noone did. If they had I might well have thought twice about wanting to learn this game I have come to love so well. It seemed like it was just a rather clever little game at the time. At this point, I know it is rather more complicated than I ever imagined, but I don't think I could give it up now, not really and for good.

Thanks Java.  I have reached a strange point in life where after 35 years in chess I have walked away from playing it mostly but still obsess about writing it.  I cannot imagine who I would have been without chess in my life and the strategy games I play in its place are always mentally compared to it regularly.

The first stanza is absolutely brilliant, the words, their meaning and the rhythm. Regarding the other two - have you checked them for correct meter? I stumbled a couple of times reading them but maybe because I pronounced some words incorrectly.

Thanks, laugh.  I do not pay the attention I should for meter as a mechanism or a constriction.  It is enough for me to get the number of syllables correct and retain the meaning I am aiming for.  I generally just use poems to write stories with insufficient substance to sustain a proper narrative.  That's an admission I know - I jot down ideas and then decide which ones I can flesh out and which will just have to be a little rhyme.  Beyond that, aside from the occasional experiment like the homonym ones, I cannot bear to restrict the language I use with further structural demands.  Having said that, some of my non-chess ones, where the subject is not so narrow, utilise some weird tricks like entire verses or even one entire poem has the initials spelling out another message altogether.  As I say, I would like to think of myself as a storyteller first, a clown second and a poet reluctantly.

You know this poem got me to wondering, too; those of us that are drawn to chess... are we drawn to it because of how our brains work or is it that our brains work as they do BECAUSE of the chess?

Interesting question but probably not one there is a very good answer to.

Very nice, I translated some poems from Polish to English and find it quite difficult to coordinate the meaning, rhythm and rhymes.

Surely as a native speaker you suffer less while writing poetry but still, I find Slavic languages easier for that because the syntax is more flexible and you can put the words in a sentence in nearly any order without changing the overall meaning.

Good job!