shame

explicit.

--

late spring, streams
vulgar with snowmelt. he leans
with his shoulder up against
the back of the barn between
the cedar wall of the barn
and the wire fence hot with day
with his pants half down
pulling on himself as if he was
yanking cork from glass.
hunched in on himself as if
he might unbottle something beautiful
from the ache in the lamp
of his pelvis. the little stream by
his parents house is muddy
hooking ripples
like barbed wire or the fatherly rhythm
of fly-fishing.

a dog barks behind the fence.
he looks up even thirstier,
flickering like a new horse,
and lowers his hands runs
his fingers over buttons and leaves
spring behind
the barn.

Well...

Wow. Most definitely wow. I was surprised by this. I hadn't expected the poem?? to take a look at something like that, but I did enjoy it. I could picture it in my head (in a non erotic way, my head just pictures things when I read) and it was like a painting almost. I could see the stream, the barn, the boy, dog, everything.

No, no. Not a painting, more along the lines of an old movie, where they were old black and white ones, no sound and the flickering lights? Yeah, that's how I pictured this.

one bad note.

the back of the barn between
the cedar wall of the barn

Bit repetitive of the word barn, but other than that, you did a great job for painting a picture for the reader to envision!

I was thinking just the other day that I missed your poetry, and then I saw this and was like, "omgyaymustread!" only, when I did, I found myself not liking this poem at all. There are several reasons, but I'll cover the specifics first.

explicit.

Not sure if this was meant as a disclaimer or part of the poem.

the back of the barn between
the cedar wall of the barn

"Of the barn" is too repetitive.

in the lamp / of his pelvis

"Say what?" was my initial reaction. Lamps and pen Mr. Nether Horn do not connect well; the image I got initially involved one of those stereotypical jinni lamps embedded (rather uncomfortably) in someone's hips. The sudden switch to lamp from bottle also struck me as a bit out of place since before then, you'd been referring to Mr. Nether Horn as being bottle-like.

This isn't the only case of image dissonance, but the others seem to have been created by a lack of punctuation. Speaking of, the last stanza suffers the most from the inconsistent punctuation, especially the list section. I had to reread it several times before it made sense. The line breaks don't help matters either, and actually contribute of the blurring of everything into one muddled lump of stanza, which severely cripples the ending.

Comprehensibility takes precedence over form, and right now, this poem is lacking that comprehensibility. I suggest perhaps being a bit more consistent with the punctuation and clarifying where sentences or items end with punctuation and/or line breaks and/or other methods. The run-ons you have really don't contribute much to this piece, aside from making it confusing and less-accessible.

That said, another source of disappointment in this poem was that it was so straightforward. There were none of the relevant and vividly imageried tangents that I adore in your pieces to be found, and so this piece felt rather blunt and bleak rather than storied and lush. And yet, there's just enough imagery that it isn't entirely blunt and bleak, and so this piece comes off as hovering in a limbo, as if you made attempts to include the tangents, but held back.

As it stands, there's imagery here, but it's fairly simplistic imagery. I would have liked to have seen either a bit more lushness, or more simplicity, rather than the half-way that I see here.