Cutthroat

Patience drips like sweat from his pores
(coagulating rivers bridging his nose);
a shark whose victims bleed
fist-sized cue balls.

Cigarette smoke haunts the graveyard with spherical tombstones.

And the dark side of the moon
has Omega illuminated
by ivory soap-shaving white.

Nautical titans.
Gods whose rigid lightning bolts
strike serpentine.
Lunge, crack, and
timpani colored thunder rolls like
a thousand Herculean roars.

– armed with cartilage appendage cues –

They lean.
They slump in the jaundiced pools of light.
Snap of the wrist, fingers punching fists
bone on bone.
Ivory skin glistening like foam white
thighs, tattooed with numbers
from one to fifteen.

Cut it thin.

Bank it hard.

Pockets accept offerings with all-inclusive embraces
and sharks smile.

The imagery in this piece is beautifully intoxicating as you read. Your choice of words is very 'predatory', and hints at the underlying carnage of the scene being played out in the piece.

Personally, I've never seen poetry that consists of dashes(-text-), but it breaks up the monotony of the verse and gives the poem a sense of character and originality.

Very nice work.

i love it.
intriguing and original.

I really liked the unorthodox formatting of this poem. It adds so much to the choppy, violent writing. Your descriptions were great stuff.

Ha, as a totally weird coincidence, I was just reading a short story by Isaaic Asimov in which one of the characters dies because he is shot through with a billiard ball moving at the speed of light. I think you meant your cue ball figuratively, but it just struck up this image in my head.

Very nice poem. The pace and the language were so beautiful, and yet gritty and fast all at the same time. I was drawn in immediately. Great job.

*thumbs up*

Keep it up!

~GryphonFledgling

This seems more like an experiment than a real, solid poem. The entire structure threw me off a little, though I generally liked the paced, chopped lines and wildly astounding visuals.

– armed with cartilage appendage cues –

This really makes this poem too disjointed, and it's almost telling, not showing. If you would incorporate this one into the next stanza, this would fix the idea that this poem is more like a screenplay that the poem it should be.

Anyway, good job overall.

I'm siding with Gadi on this one. It seemed more like an experiment then an actual poem. You basically broke all the formating structures with your second line and continued from there.

"Patience drips like sweat from his pores
(coagulating rivers bridging his nose);
a shark whose victims bleed
fist-sized cue balls.

Cigarette smoke haunts the graveyard with spherical tombstones.

And the dark side of the moon
has Omega illuminated
by ivory soap-shaving white. "

The first stanza is just weird. And cue balls are just odd to use. The next one....well, do I even need to ask what that relates to? Or why 'Omega' is capitalized as a name. Then Ivory soap shaving...double pun? All with 'dark side of the moon' being a weird nod.

Then we get into this Greek bit

"Nautical titans.
Gods whose rigid lightning bolts
strike serpentine.
Lunge, crack, and
timpani colored thunder rolls like
a thousand Herculean roars. "

Titans
Zeus
Uh...what?
Color of thunder?
Ummm...why do I get Sparta out of that?

It just keeps going on, confusing and making little practical sense, you have too many disjointed pieces and you betray form for this weird experiment that is not poetry, not prose, but something entirely different.

Perhaps a critique of this will allow you to forgive me for not critiquing your short story yet. ^^, I will find the time soon, I am trying!

Patience drips like sweat from his pores
(coagulating rivers bridging his nose);
a shark whose victims bleed
fist-sized cue balls.

Honestly, I hated the parenthesis. I'm thinking, why can't he just use a comma? Parenthesis need to have a special reason to be there, more than punctuation related reasons, so what is your special reason? If you have one, I missed it.


Your imagery was beautiful; it always is? But I honestly can't say a whole lot. Your poetry is dripping with so much imagery but to the point where I have to swim around for content and meaning, practically drowning in the beauty of it. I'm always stuck asking: What is he talking about? Maybe I'm not understanding it, I don't know. Perhaps your meanings are buried deep and I cannot find them. It would be nice for me to understand something, for once. ^_^

I like this poem very much.

However, you have quite a bit of imagery in there, and if it weren't for the title, I would be quite lost. Without meaning, a poem just becomes some pretty words strung together.

My favorite part of the poem was the beginning, it really set the tone for the rest of the poem. Nice work.