‘Tis the season for parody

‘Tis the season to be jolly and implement rampant sarcasm against the sacred and the ever popular. Sometimes as a writer you just don’t want to spend time searching the depths of your soul, testing the endurance of your keyboard to produce transcendent existentialism that will live in the minds and the hearts of frustrated school children till kingdom come. Sometimes, you just want to have a good time and exorcise the demons with a poison pen and, sometimes as a reader, you just want some entertaining junk food fiction. We can’t always be Shakespeare and we don’t always want to read the 100 Greatest either. So, it’s time to switch the paradigms and mock everything we normally revere. What better place to start than with the writings of Sylvia Plath who once referred to life as an inveterate “death soup” – a statement that had me falling off the sofa with laughter. Yes, it’s time for a trip down memory lane back to my first semester junior year. The weather was just turning nippy and my presentation for Advanced Poetry was coming due. Guess who I chose to write a ten page paper and deliver a twenty minute PowerPoint complete with a tasteless background where Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” crooned in tinny fuzziness. Yep. ‘Twas me. Plath was my poet and after reading The Bell Jar and two of her poetry collections, I decided one midnight dreary to have a little fun with Plath’s lavish morbidity. I might also add that we had to write a poetry piece in the voice of our chosen author. Want to have a look at the two ridiculous poems (neither of which I dared turn in) which were spawned by some late night mockery and a sufficiently embittered young adult prospective:

Poem One:

How It Really Happened

Mirror, mirror
on the wall,
fuck you
break and fall.

Dear old Cinders
still pretending?
Discard the shattered slippers.
Accept solitude never-ending.

Fairy godmother
where were you?
She cut her wrists.
The corpse turned blue.

Prince Charming,
you never came.
She died alone;
she hoped in vain.

The chariot turned, the hour struck.
She gave up. She had no luck.

Incidentally, feel free to mock my punctuation above. Oh, and, as if that wasn’t enough, meet poem number two which is far worse:

                                                                                                                     Cinderella’s Revenge

Once upon a time
The death hour chimes:

Mirror, mirror
on the wall,
fuck you
break and fall

Dear old Cinders
you are no longer pretending.
Discard the shattered slippers;
you’re accepting solitude never-ending.

The merry mice-men never came.
In solitude you wanted to die again
and again. A girl so strong and beautiful,
good and dutiful, is descending into sin.

Fairy godmother
Where are you?
She’s cutting their throats.
Look! Corpses are draining blue.

Prince Charming
you never came.
She’s taking bloody revenge;
they are dying in pain.

And so, the chariot turned, the hour struck.
The blade sunk into heart’s home.
She gave up. She had no luck.
But the sisters met their fate.

The scene is closed; the myth
is ore. Cinders never had a mate
but she won the game,
victorious in hate.

The End.
No Amend.

How’s that for some ludicrous writing? Ok, it’s definitely not quality, but it was fun. Sometimes as a writer, you need to stop taking yourself quite so seriously and just exercise the pen with some pointless fun. This stuff isn’t publishable – it’s rubbish. Sometimes rubbish serves its purpose too and you should never be ashamed to use parody as a way to channel the muse. You actually learn quite a lot about the process of serious writing by breaking it down with sarcasm.

And now, in honor of the holidays, here are two fun parodies. The first one is an Indian version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and the second offering is a grimmer tale mocking horror movies. Merry Christmas everybody! Now go and have some fun with your writing.

And the second, grimmer offering:

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