x

What is this? Perhaps I have missed some longer change in your work, but I remember you as a poet with the ear to avoid poems like this that seethe with fruitless emotion, and never progress past the original starting point. I missed the imagery, I missed the language, but most of all, I missed the outreach to the reader. What was intended to be to hook here?

PenguinAttack wrote:
What did you do to me

Asking a rhetorical question can be a strong way to open a poem, but this opening utterly fails. It is concerned with the writer, not the reader, and it is vague in the extreme.

that I am this way
and not some other I cannot
even fathom tonight.
Tomorrow I will get high
and pretend to understand
- honestly
how you made me who I am.
Motherfucking pot and all.

This stanza is where your reader will stop reading. It's a total mess, full of angst in its first half, and confusion in its second, and ends with the word 'Motherfucking' which is embarrassingly out of place, and poorly chosen. If it was intended to shock, then it was added for the wrong reason, otherwise, it was probably included in this poem for a lack of any deeper understanding of the situation.

I have nothing against a good piece of profanity now and then, but, dammit, you're going to have to be a bit more fucking careful if you're going to include shit like this in your poetry. It just doesn't work.

I recall your hands
on my face at night.
You were a nightmare mother.
I see you in my dreams

Telling, telling, telling. What was it about the touch of the hands?

and scream
as though I am six and
you are beside me
and we are together
for only one moment
in fifty. I wish you were a number
like me.
Instead you are timelessly aging.[/quote[
Lines like 'I wish you were a number/like me' are more of that self-centered garbage that makes this poem so unaccessible. And again, the whole middle of this poem is telling, and it's boring, and nobody will make it all the way through.

How did you make me

Redundant, unnecessary.

like the image of my father
though I never met him?
I hope he is dead
away from you and the storming
caricature of your face in the morning.
Do you ever sleep?

And then you introduce this father, and we're told the poet is like the father, presumably something repugnant, yet then the poet expresses sympathy for him. This seemed to present two wildly different versions of this character, and some clarity would be nice. But beyond that, why introduce a totally new character now?

In my dreams I begged
a spectre to steal me away from
your womb.

Perhaps I am stolen and you
have never been my mother.
This comforts me as your hands
wash the dirt
- that doesn’t exist
from under my nails.

The transition and connection between the first stanza here, and the second is clumsy. The ending for the second stanze here makes absolutely no sense. Are her hands washing dirt, or no dirt? Does it even matter? What does that mean anyway?

I could have been a changeling
away from you,
in my dreams.

This poem is flat out bad. It is defcient in pretty much every facet which distinguishes good poetry from bad monologue.