Foreign Streets

Entry for Wiseman's poetry competition.

Foreign streets

General moon with her
Host of stars is out,
And so are we.
Mingling amongst fellow
Revellers, all flocking
Towards the same destination-
Bright lights and
Reverberating beats.

Wading in, instantly
Separated from oneself
And joined to a single,
Seething organism,
Lost to the music
And copious amounts
Of alcohol.

8 am and the sun's first
Tentative rays
Find us stumbling
Homeward along
Foreign streets,
Bin men appearing
Like wraiths in
The early morning grey.

Laughing, we abuse
Other stumblers
As we stagger onwards,
Instinct guiding us back,
To bed, and safety-
From half cut to
Total oblivion, escape.
Until then we continue,
Intoxicated, stumbling
Through life.

jones32 --

There are bits and pieces of this poem that I like very much, but on the whole, they are choked out by unoriginal language and a lackluster, half-hearted "meaning". I think that the main problem this poem suffers from is that it's too blunt. It's too obvious. There isn't any grace here. You take the image of everyone in the world as stumbling drunks and you inflate it, being sure to spell out for your readers exactly what you're getting at. I think that this is what bothers me most about amatuer poetry, and even some published poetry: you view poetry more as a vessel for a message, then as a vessel for a snapshot of something beautiful. Too many people try to drive home their point in a poem, and by the wayside falls the delicacy and the complex airiness of a poem. Strive to use more imagery. In a poem, every word counts. Waste not.

Your message here is overused and clumsy. I walk away from this poem feeling nothing. And honestly, when I read a poem, I want to be struck first by the language of the piece, not what it means. Meaning is secondary. So when you bring this poem stumbling to its knees with your final line, "through life", you immediately butcher the ambiguity that poetry should lend itself to.

Read poetry. Go out and buy or borrow a collection of American Twentieth century poetry. Absorb it. Learn from it.

The tidbits I liked:

General moon with her
Host of stars is out,
And so are we.

...

Separated from oneself
And joined to a single,
Seething organism,

...

8 am and the sun's first
Tentative rays
Find us stumbling
Homeward along
Foreign streets,
Bin men appearing
Like wraiths in
The early morning grey.

PM me with questions.

-Kylan