Poetry Fishbowl Open!

What would a city look like for people other than humans, with their different abilities and perceptions? Would a flying people still build skyscrapers? Would a burrowing people build anything above-ground? How do you find directions when traveling in a space-benders' city?

One of the themes I list in my user interests is "wildernism", the counterpart to "urbanism". How would one go about balancing these things if starting from a lack of experience, such as someone who's lived in the suburbs all their life?

Do stars build cities? Would anyone smaller recognize them as such?

Are there realms where cities don't exist? What reasons might there be for this?

And what happens when the kirigami mage stops at a city for the day?

Gargoyles.

Sewers and/or sewer rats.

Magical pranks at the science museum.

Things uncovered during remodeling.

Spring cleaning.

Sidewalks, particularly disrupting or maintaining them -- shoveling snow, re-laying brick, tree roots, utility repairs ...

Abstract sculpture. I can't immediately find a photo of the one I was thinking of, but this one is similar.

City spirits. ;)

Not being a city person per say, this is a bit harder for me.

Public transport is something that makes me think city - smaller towns and rural areas do not have busses and subways. Subways in particular are kind of magical to me as a result (especially since the maps are NOT to scale at all - things that look miles apart are actually just blocks away, but the two lines don't connect, so they appear far apart).

Also, cities have sewers/under-street areas. Small rural towns don't, and as a kid shows like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and jokes about alligators in the sewers made sense in some way - sewers were these things we did not have, so of course it was easier to imagine strange things happening there (indeed, novels like Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman work for me for this very reason).

I am also a huge fan of gargoyles! I saw that the freebie poem is about them, and would love more. I have to run out and don't have time to read now, but I am sure I will like it if it has gargoyles!

I am pretty sure that dragons live in the New York subways.

Magic makes technology unstable... so what happens to cars, and phones, and (*gulp!*) airplanes?

Gaslight and cold iron

A magic-based ambulance

University demons. This may only make sense in my head, due to my own experiences, and the patron demon of scribes, Titivillus.

We talk about cities growing and decaying. If a city were to function like an organism, how would it obtain the resources it needed? How would it defend itself? How would it communicate? Would it have its own music? Would different cities intentionally compete with each other? Do cities have memories? Do they dream?

Ever seen the DC subways? They're curvy and organic and rather beautiful in parts, and I've often thought that they must have been built by elves.

Some magical explanation for disappearing socks, etc.

Magical beings that can disguise themselves as machines or other stuff.

Magical beings that get into computers (like, into the software) and mess around with things inside.

Urban legends (like stolen kidneys) are true because the old monsters have found new tactics.

A world that looks just like ours but uses magic instead of technology. Maybe they burn pixie dust instead of gasoline, and the pixies are going extinct as a result. (Maybe pixie dust is made OF pixies?)

Some of the people in prison aren't really people.

Your house is out to kill you.

The literal ghost in the machine.

Maybe some of the real-world ramifications of the Ghostbusters mythos being real. What if ghosts really could be seen, captured, ectoplasm studied, etc.

Your late Aunt Gertrude still chats with you on Facebook. (This could either be super sweet or really creepy.)

An online game so addicting that if you play for too long, your soul gets sucked in and your body goes into a coma.

A lawyer defends a ghost or demon client against the charge of possession. (Maybe even possession with intent to distribute! :-D )

Child custody battle between a human and a fairy. (Either the kind you'd find in standard lore, or they were married and had halfblood kids.)

(I have a character who is a zombie and is also a lawyer for non-human civil rights. It's a comedy universe, so his name is Henry Fangballs.)

Hmmm.

I lived in DC, and moved to fairly-rural Central New York. People often ask me, when I mention where I came from, "Why did you move here?"

That strikes me as the thing--moving to cities, moving from cities, and why people do it. There seem to be people (and, assumably, fantastic creatures) who just Work in one place or the other--and it's not always that they were born there. I guess that migration would be my idea.


Or, failing that, the idea of a monster entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship always occurred to me as . . . I don't know, basically dreams made real. I sort of wonder how a monster would take to that.

I'd love to know what a disgruntled bumble bee thinks as it goes from flower to flower (and what happened to make it disgruntled)!

The constant war between a city of iron and the green.
What happens to the ghosts when a haunted house is torn down?
The survival guide of the animals spirits in a city.
A building is an ecosystem.
Where do the shadows go at night?
The dysfunctional relationship of magic and technology.
There is another city under this one, where the unknown dwelled.
You can never graduate if you walk through a certain door in a university.
Wandering Jew