A Moment of Silence

I tumble forth into the world.

From a womb-vessel wrought,
I sat and thought
near the edges of time

till the moment came to ruin my
oblique heaven.

Old doctor, with gnarled hands and yellow skin, you
rip me like giblets from this holy place.

You slap me on the counter-top scale,
wrap me in wax-paper swaddling, and
hand me over,
choking on birth-matter.

My manger is a dim world.
Somewhere, there is a mother sobbing as a
planet rises through the clouds.

Time runs in spirals through the dust.
There is a quiet,
awkward solitude.

Doctor, why do you wear the ape-mask
while summoning dead gods back to earth?

This is dazzling and dizzying.

From a womb-vessel wrought,

I sat and thought

I have this problem with poems that don't rhyme and randomly have one rhyme. Is it on purpose or on accident? You can never be sure.

Old doctor, with gnarled hands and yellow skin, you

rip me like giblets from this holy place.

This is my favorite part. So strange and beautiful.

Old doctor, with gnarled hands and yellow skin, you

rip me like giblets from this holy place.
...
You slap me on the counter-top scale,

wrap me in wax-paper swaddling, and

hand me over,

I guess my one other nitpick is these dangling words. Why? They just create unnecessary pauses in the wrong places.

Really good job.
-Rachel

four out of five stars.
I really enjoyed this poem, the impact is felt not only in it's interesting language but also it's meaning to the reader.
It's trippy and moody, as any good poems seem to be.
continue

I really liked this and thought it was very powerful. I agree with nixonblitzen on how some of the lines end with dangling words, but mostly I think this works very well.

I was a little thrown by these stanzas:

My manger is a dim world.
Somewhere, there is a mother sobbing as a
planet rises through the clouds.

Time runs in spirals through the dust.
There is a quiet,
awkward solitude.

Doctor, why do you wear the ape-mask
while summoning dead gods back to earth?

The second stanza of these makes sense, but the surrounding ones, while the images are powerful, left me rather confused. Especially the last one just didn't make sense to me. Suddenly a poem which had been a rather impressionistic account of a birth became...very surreal. I didn't know what you were trying to say anymore. It's your poem, but I just thought I would let you know that my reaction to that was not positive...

Mostly I found it worked very well, though. Well done. Keep writing!

~Stripes