I wrote this using a pen and paper and then typed it out, in the process switching "road" for "land" in the third line, making it mismatch its formal partner, the last line, and also making it a bit meaningless, given that the "blackened fence" is supposed to be the road itself. People seemed to like it anyway, which is more than I expected. If anyone thought I was doing subtle form variations: no, I'm just scatty.

Kellnerin deserves the credit for being the first wfc participant to machete her way through the tangled lantana of poem submission. That was also the first time I'd noticed what a terzanelle was, or possibly read one.

I did have a plan for a time travel short story. It's still not a bad idea but it wasn't getting anywhere by the original deadline. So for some reason I thought a poem might work. I made the lines short as I find the meter easier to match that way. Also I like short lines. Turned out the deadline was extended, and I had intended to write a story rather than make this my main submission. However after the last-minute focus to submit one thing, I couldn't quite get the motivation to restart another.

The night before the deadline I saw a doco on The Triffids album Born Sandy Devotional. One of the best known songs off that is Wide Open Road, and the album itself is supposed to be one of the great driving albums, though I don't own a copy myself. At some point watching that it occurred to me that the wide open road is kind of a misnomer. I also had in mind the interview with Simon Norfolk I mentioned in response to blixco. This is where the Roman line comes from:

BLDGBLOG: It's like the Roman roads in London, that you describe in your writings: they're actually a military transport system, still there beneath modern streets. London is a military landscape.

Norfolk: Absolutely: it's military technology left lying around. This stuff comes down to us. You know, the reason I can take night shot photographs is not because Mr. Kodak wanted me to take these photographs, but because he needed to design a certain kind of film that could go into a Mosquito bomber and take reconnaissance photographs during the Second World War. That's really when all the advances in film were made – in grain-structure – and it was for aerial reconnaissance.

The title might owe something to this fascinating but essentially unrelated article.

The responses were interesting and gratifying. Thanks. I was pretty pleased that Phage picked up it was an Australian poem. I also liked ana's switchback interpretation, especially because I didn't have it in mind. The response from Husi's resident poetry critic BO were also fascinating (he said a cycle of poems would better fit this formal form), because of the volume of poetry reading he (?) must do relative to most. This is almost a variant of the usual feedback on my stories: it just ends and doesn't conclude. He's right that one of the appeals of a formal form to me is that as a writer I know when it's done; maybe that's a crutch.

As one of those immediately skippable dvd special features, the original as intended, with one word different.

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Verse For The Self-Pitying Construction Worker

The open road is closed
A blackened fence
Upon the land imposed.

That sweeping sense
Brown landscape bound inside
A blackened fence

We pass a blood-stained hide
All roads echo
Brown landscape bound inside

Roman hero
Stomping blurry faces
All roads echo

Dopplerred queueing races
This narrowness
Stomping blurry faces

Unemptiedness.
The open road is closed
This narrowness
Upon the land imposed.