still, life

still, life

She named me after a dead man,
because children must lose things;
space, when it falls down your throat
and pricks your adam's apple clean.
cannot breathe you think.
No one hears the rubix-cube
of life scream between the muscles
of a sigh.

"Beloved by (God)",
she called me after a death in the desert,
because child and mother watched time die
sprawled like dirty laundry over a neck-split
from body; yet he whispered like a coo rolling
from a shepherd baby's sheets,
"still, life".

Here, the dead man taught me youth
drips like water from the crevice of my mother's hand,
and though she cradles the fluid fawn in her next palm
it runs runs, runs away
as she grabs the dead man before he flies,
snaps his spine against the sand.
Because you my mother,
crawl a small space, gasp with no breath,
painting the portait of a still, life
as it moves towards death.

I read the first stanza and just said aloud, what? Then i read it aloud and I don't know. It just doesn't seem to follow. But that's okay because the next two were strong, and the third was the strongest, which is exactly the structure you want. THE DEAD MAN TAUGHT ME YOUTH. That is a great line, it has so many layers of meaning its great. Also loved fluid fawn. This is a poem of strange images. Its got the color scheme of a pale desert with random cartoon vividness thrown in.

Didn't like
runs runs runs away. Sounds kind of like row row row your boat. I also can't help but think of Runaway by Del Shannon. WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY she ran awayyyyyyy. You know?

I did like the ending quite a bit, honestly I think you could have done more with the whole still life concept. To me this feels incomplete. It needs to be sharpened to bring everything into focus better... more concise, I guess. It's a start, though.

(i have poem called Still Life Pending)

best,

MrM!
This makes me very happy to see, I don’t know how to tell you. I feel like this is much better than whatever must have come before it. There’s cohesion and some very strong focus. A sense of the personal, the empathetic, that I’ve been missing from your work thus far. This is a good poem, a little shaky on emotion still but very much further than you have been.

What I’m not such a fan of at the moment is the repetitive mother/child image. I understand what you’re saying and why, and how it ties directly into what your poem is attempting to convey. I still don’t like it, I picked it up as a theme, as a technique rather, very quickly. I want to see a bit more subtlety from you, but I’ll take this for some time. You’re moving from slam to more formal poetry, it’s a difficult and complex conversion. “rubix cube of life” is terrible. Just. Really terrible. xD I enjoyed the muscle/sigh very much. It’s a much better image and I’d remove the other and keep this one.

Summary: Consider being less overt with you mother/child theme.
You know where to find me for more.
-Penguin

Pepper,

as Perdido said, the first stanza is flailing - unsure of its point, its purpose. It's a stanza that you often see in writing, the inch in, it gives you time to get your brain moving in the right direction, to push up through the crowd and stick your elbows out to get up in the front of your mind and our attention. Despite its usefulness to you, it sits empty, confused and lost in the process. It gives context, it gives a flow and an introduction but it's like the old chair with a broken leg that you use to hang up the chandelier.

still, life

She named me after a dead man,
because children must lose things;
space, when it falls down your throat
and pricks your adam's apple clean.
cannot breathe you think.
No one hears the rubix-cube
of life scream between the muscles
of a sigh.

Your italics are wonderful, they're powerful lines. But it's all that sticks out, in my mind, of this stanza. They're being dragged down by the lines that are only being used as scrambling footholds. And as you might have taken from this is that it really does detract from the overall strength of the poem. Moving on:

"Beloved by (God)",
she called me after a death in the desert,
because child and mother watched time die
sprawled like dirty laundry over a neck-split
from body; yet he whispered like a coo rolling
from a shepherd baby's sheets,
"still, life".

Better, much so. You've got your flow down quite well. "Beloved by (God)" strikes me as much colder and stiffer in contrast to the stanza. It's not a nice thing to read, it's like chewing on broken glass. Why make it harder to us to hook on with something to brick-like at the top of the stanza where we start to emerge into some light?

Here, the dead man taught me youth
drips like water from the crevice of my mother's hand,
and though she cradles the fluid fawn in her next palm
it runs runs, runs away
as she grabs the dead man before he flies,
snaps his spine against the sand.
Because you my mother,
crawl a small space, gasp with no breath,
painting the portait of a still, life
as it moves towards death

As Perdido said "the dead man taught me youth" is a wonderful line. It says lots without an over dependence on what's said before it or after it. It tells me, the reader, something important but can still remain in the context you've created for it. It's good, really good.

Definitely the strongest stanza, the imagery is there and present and imposing. It's enough to round us out at the end of the poem and walk away with a sense of understanding at the end. If only you'd gotten the ball rolling sooner. You lose the steady flow you had going for you in the second stanza near the middle of this stanza, almost like you're trying to cling to poetry before tumbling into some prose-hybrid and I can feel it, it's a little more roughly cut. Careful with that,
as soon as you get too caught up in a prose-like story, you'll find it very difficult to not have your stanza tense up at that sensation. Also, portraits*

My issue with your poetry is how fickle you are with your imagery, your descriptions. We jump around from children to mothers to a man's Adam's apple to rubix-cubes to deserts to shepherd's baby sheets to painting to violence to body parts. It's all such a quick gash into your poem that it fades quickly and in the end doesn't serve to improve the general poem, to add greater meaning. I mean "rubix-cube of life"? That's about as bad as that time I said something along the lines of "lampposts of time" or whatever. What does it mean to me, what is this rubix-cube of life? What does it tell me? How can I possibly imagine it without being blinded by the searing pain of the cliche "x of life" brings forth. Be more consistent, follow your theme and branch off from it carefully and logically to preserve your tone and the attention of your reader. Don't scatter yourself all over the board.

Kamas