The lost line the Road

written 3/5/11
reposted 4/16/11

The lost line the Road

To the children of the 60's, who are either dead, old, or killing everything they ever did.

I.
I am the restless.
I am suppressed by the generation that delivered civil emancipation with the Howl heard round the world,
the “modern” generation that suppresses suppression by correcting expression, and
I am the restless generation where nothing is expressed.
I am condemned a rapist and sinner after a half attended TV dinner between an Internet habit and a hazy family drag, and I am labeled a hacker by the opportunist preachers and political jesters that inhabit the screen when
I am one of Anonymous and labeled one of the many, grouped into a bite size statistic easy to digest, and
I will be martyred a saint and remembered for all of the things I am not. 
I am the restless.
I am a pile-driver ramming into your earth, cracking and eviscerating the seeds I inherited called gods and democracy, choosing to abort the possibility of progeny.
And come morning, the oil is gone and the smell of fish, dry, and only Calliope at my side,
and I am the restless, leaving the nest a free bird in song.

II.
Slogging through in the sun's hangover
down an Old Church Road, worn
leather soles rubbing viscous acrid vomit,
that lines the cracked concrete street
I meet after yet another indulgence.
I fumbled blindly to find these shoes
that weren't mine, at the foot of a
bed. GetoutGetoutGetout-
was the only thing in my head.
 
Where am I? I should ask, but never consider.
I will walk freely in streets with these anti-social social
hemorrhaging, decaying things that are people by day,
and wanderers like me, by twilight.  And
I am their pariah and arbiter of their fear for their childrens' future,
because in me they desire freedom, freedom from
a prison of decision and indecision, because
I am ahead of their curve and they are
too afraid to walk astray when they tell their children
to follow the line and they know it is a line and a line
marking the bars of the cell in jail, and they cannot embrace reality past
the curtain after the play, and see cyberspace for
the void that night pales to compare. And outside
 
Nature greets me with a kiss on the street,
Eurus' wind is another bitch on my skin
coupled with bristling, spearing hail and rain,
and I'm lost seeing these “Zoloft”, “MAD”, & “Viagra”
ads and signs for the first time.  And I'm
wondering if there's a (way) home again.
And I'm content, because I am lost.
 
My ambling marathon to nowhere jogs nothing,
not-withstanding Zeus's hangover shower,
that I don't mind.  Out of the corner a woman sees me, spies me
spying her, scowls at my smile, and scurries past the slow
sight of my eyes; and I think I slept with someone that looks like her, once.
“Get out of the road!” and I nearly die, a foot from being bumper's road-meal,
yelled at by the driver of a Rolls Royce; I've
been wandering in the road since my pap told me
it was cheaper than sitting at the back of the bus, and
I think it's a pity the driver didn't hit me
and slow down and enjoy life.
 
It was 8 years ago, or however many fingers I have up
And the bottles shining in the evening sun began to make a rainbow
on my face each night, when art & life made way to become
a jackhammer of self-destruction, naivety and innocence drowned in a bucket, 
beat out by a hammer, savored in women and men's skin,
and my dreams took a walk down winding paths to the dark hovels
Momma' said'd drop me dead; that funny gal, I saw
her go into them each night, when she always forgot to welcome me to
gentle Sandman's sleep.  And I reasoned I was misguided.
I was just being a good Momma's boy, since pap committed suicide.
 
I should be dead, says my gut cringe & twinge, a lime colored slime
sliding with my liver under the pallid vest I treat like used toilet paper. 
“You should be dead” says an old man, sitting inside the metal and glass bus-stop box
I smack my face into.  My body topples wistfully, greeting old friend cement
and I lay there rigidly like an artist's broken manikin, and
I'm drawn to the ground with those worn leather shoes that
aren't mine.  “Get out of my way!” and I'm helped, with an iron toed boot,
a fat bureaucrat, who wears his Sunday soot on Monday so he thinks
he smells nostalgic like grandpa, and no one can smell Mephistopheles on his soul.  I know him,
from pictures by beds and on screens, and I probably slept with his wife years before they met; it's always consensual
in euphoria and waste, so it's easier for good friends to forget.
 
And I return to the road, hand on my gut and hand on my head, I am dancing
with the green liquor fairy paying me another visit in the shadows the sun hides from
where none of the masquerading day humans can see, I, out in the road, and they
say I am blind walking with the cars, and I laugh because
I am dancing not walking, because I know and do not know where I have been because
they deny me identity when labeling me free, dropping me from
Lady Liberty's crown and say Athena will catch me before the Ground
if I repent for their wasted cowboy smallpox blanket diplomacy, so graciously lent,
and if I mend my ways and show responsibility and label selfishness a business opportunity;
because God's eyes are always watching, but God has no eyes to give
and those lining the way remove their eyes and walk in a land of the blind
in a time with no sight, in a date with no place, and the drivers are always driving
but with no vision of where they are going, and the pedestrians are hurrying and worrying
of the fear of the unseen self-fulfilling prophecy, until one with eyes has found them and
they SHRIEK in pity and defense for their blindness, and the children are given a map and told only
to never wander into the road and follow only the lines made in the light,
and they follow tragic misled Oedipus and pluck their sight.

III.
In the road, I've learnt to pride the walk alone, where few have walked the way and fewer still will come, and roam
to find the Holy Grail and roam to forget the Holy Grail, because it's everything you can want but can never have and never find, and I accept the incompleteness and continue to walk the road even if I will never reach enlightenment,

Enlightenment that the street singer before me crouched on the stairwell to their Project flat rasps in melodious three second odes, in their worn black sneaker shoes and ragged patchy dust filled hair, and stained red and brown crusted dirt laden clothes imbuing the air with a nightingale's melancholy as a dream to an old poet lost in the road, but enlightened modernity has turned its back to the song and labels the bird a scourge of responsible, civil men and women
and the sound of silence grows louder still, a deafening shrill I long grew accustomed and the blind label the singer vulgar, finding no true art in their words and poetry in their silence, and calling the singer a rambling wanderer, lost,
and they cannot see, they cannot realize they are blind, they cannot feel the boulder that Sisyphus hands them to push as their card in the land of the blind, and they will push the invisible never understanding they are lost until they are dead,
and the road is lonely and barren, and few take it, and the few that are on it accept they are lost but
continue on, because once you've begun you can't step back because there is nothing to go back to, and I carry the road with me

To the clubs where I am frequent to forget where I have been and where I think I have been, and where I began on this vision to find myself and lost myself, and realized I never knew myself but was given a diploma on lambskin and stamped with red wax, but I lost it between my trail from the children's mill and the leading role in my father's war and
Lost it, feeling free, and I ventured to the clubs, and a strobe of kaleidoscope bubbles popped my world and I danced without fear, and I lost conformity, and I sinned without abandon, and I was purified in company but regretful
that everyone around me did not hear the voice of the nightingale leading us to the Promised Land and I lost
the dream in the seams between a girl's skirt, and I displayed my potency for all to see within her

and I was lost and I was content, and I was left with nowhere to go, and I wondered if home ever existed
and I remembered I was the restless and I remembered I was the outcast, I was the pornographist who
soiled the song and riddled the word with expletive expressions and was corrected for all my predilections to
genuine art; and I could not return to where I came, and on that day or night, I cannot say because I live it all
the same, I found the road and never left.

IV.
Treading the worn leather soles on wet cement that were not mine I wandered where the road had never went, to
the likes of El Dorado in downtown Detroit or Pittsburgh or Chicago, and I lamented for the people I met,

the women in bed who I left now and then in the morning who never took messages and never said goodbye and

the women who leave me alone when I smile as if I'm going to get them and their child and I'm certain I slept with some of them and am the father who will never leave them alone and will haunt their minds until they are dead and

the drivers of the cars who nearly kill me each time, who keep missing and a pity, I miss them dearly and

the old men in the bus-stops who are always waiting to go, but have nowhere to go and are waiting for Death and the only intermission is the single comment better left unsaid and

the bureaucrat caught in between his position and ideals and his sweet sugar candy for children that prepares them for indignation when their nation is in flames and their leaders must lie and

the singer on the street now buried in the shallow city street, your odes and your words gurgles from silence and
the girls in the club I find in times where I find myself, but who find nothing from me except the swollen feeling of sex lifeless and I pity the men who make wives out of them,

                                                            and I pity all of them who cannot see the road
                                                            and I pity all of them who cannot find the road

and I smile across a sheet stretched thin over a limestone skeleton, and I feel my spirits beaming through as my parents never knew, and I find men standing in a street of Gotham, a place that I have never been and they scowl at me while I smile at them and he tells me
the street is theirs in beautiful vernacular, a hood and his eyes twitch innocently
                        “Would you like to walk the road with me?” I offer happily with open arms
and I feel the worn leather soles of shoes that are not mine against my old friend wet cement and I wonder what the hood is and where it can be and I never hear the bullet rip from muzzle of the gun in the man's hand, as it shatters the neurons and severs the synapses and tears the tissues and exits out my skull like a million different beautiful specs of crimson light all over the road

and I am martyred for something I am not, and I am expressed in nothing but denial by the generation that reared me and feared me and taught me to hate all that I stood for, and so I took the road between Broadway and Iraq, and I forgot about political parties and cared nothing for Jesus or Stalin or Mao, and I cried for the restless generation which has no voice and I left my signature on the road to fester and boil for the restless to find.

Is this about someone with a mental handicap?

I suppose that is my initial interpretation. Mostly based off this line:

“Mothafucka ge' out dis street, this our hood G” and his eyes twitch innocently
“Would you like to walk the road with me?” I offer happily with open arms

Questionable punctuation/adverb use aside--I'm not sure how much you want me to say on that if you're committed to writing super creatively--this does not seem like a reaction anyone would have. At all. Regardless of what kind of nomad you were. Or perhaps they are on drugs?

And your line: "and i am martyred for something i am not." What? Why is he a martyr? From what I understand he was killed by some gangbanger because he has no social awareness. What is he not? Street smart? And why Jesus and Stalin and Mao? I feel like that's an odd trio to make: I suppose you could draw parallels between Christ and communism, but I'm not sure why they were mentioned by name over "political parties." As far as I'm aware, communism isn't a prevalent issue right now. Is there a reason it's prevalent to him?

I know I'm picking apart your final stanza but if I really went through and picked this all apart it'd be longer than your poem itself. And besides, I don't think I can. This is a hefty piece of writing, sir, and you repeat the same ideas a lot, and there are some gorgeous gems of writing in here that are getting lost behind all your words. And I understand you want to break tradition and be experimental but this is a lot to take in. This might be more of a work-for-yourself, in which case keep it as is because you don't need to "dumb it down" for anyone but if you're writing this for any kind of audience, especially if you want members of your audience to include the general public, then you've got to take a step back and figure out what ideas you're trying to say, exactly, and the best way to say it, and what ideas you want to hit; and once you've figured that out, then make it experimental. But I felt like this was more of a brain dump than anything, which I don't think is true, and I want a reader to be able to give more credit to you than that.

Perhaps the thing that kills me the most about this is that there's some amazing stuff in here. I wasn't a huge fan of your first stanza (probably more of a personal preference with my general wariness of the misunderstood loner concept) but good Lord I loved "And come morning, the oil is gone and the smell of fish, dry, and only Calliope at my side,
and I am the restless, leaving the nest a free bird in song." That's gorgeous, and descriptive, and concise, and you used an adjective as a noun, which is fantastic. So there's this wonderfulness within a lot of hit-you-over-your-head lines about the evils of modern society. The second stanza's probably my favorite of this whole poem, perhaps because it's easiest to digest but it still has such a strong message--see? It's possible to be poignant with just a handful of words.

Then there are long strings of run-on sentences, on purpose I'm sure but still hard to swallow, and lots of confusing talk, as if you tried to cram all the deep thoughts you have down our throats in one poem, and Part III is just a little terrifying to look at, let alone try to understand. But then I stumble on these gems:

"I probably slept with his wife years before they met; it's always consensual
in euphoria and waste, so it's easier for good friends to forget."

"It was 8 years ago, or however many fingers I have up"

There are some good lines in here. It's just hard to sift them out. And I think you need to pick one or two ideas from this piece and run with them; you can always come back to the others later.

I'm really sorry--I feel like I'm being harsh. If this is more of something you've just written for yourself, then I'm glad you've found a way to express your thoughts, but if you're considering writing ever for an audience, I'd advise you to learn to harness your thoughts and create something that will create a connection to the higher reading audience--I'm afraid the way you've written this poem will alienate them even more than the traditional, formal methods of modern art.

There's something in here that really is intriguing to me--if you ever do end up editing it, I'd love to see what you do with it!

Okay, cut the convention-vs-experimentation drama for a second. A few things I need to point out to you:

[1.]

All art is based on a constant flux between chaos and order. Order is the constants, the norms, the everyday things, the ordinary, what comforts us, security. Chaos is the dash of something new, originality, inventiveness, insight, creativity, making the ordinary extraordinary, acute observation, points of difference, innovation.

To convey something new to someone old, you must use language. If you wanted to be completely experimental, you would make up your own -- absolute disregard for syntax and punctuation and anything that anyone can remotely even recognise as being meaningful. Okay, so say you do this. Then what? Then no one understands the gibberish you put up. What do you achieve? Nothing. So what do you do? You write in English. You use a language everyone is familiar with. You put some order, just by the very fact you’ve used words, and, in this case, capitals, and the occasional comma or two or fifty. What makes it interesting is the experimentation/originality/inventiveness. What makes it understandably and fascinatingly interesting is the fact that people can actually understand it in some part, any part, no matter how little. Of course, leave room for ambiguity/double meanings/ paradoxes -- keep people wondering. Leave some chaos in there.

Here’s what I am saying: you need both -- chaos and order. There’s no point to just ‘order’ because it’s boring. Predictable. Flat. Conventional. But there’s no point to utter chaos, either, because we do not understand it and if we do not understand it -- neither intellectually, nor emotionally, nor aesthetically -- then it has no effect on us. It doesn’t make us think. It doesn’t make us feel. It doesn’t show us anything new, even if it says something new, because of the simple fact we don’t get it. We write poetry for effect. Catharsis. Manipulation. How does one hope to manipulate when the means of manipulation is incomprehensible?

I guess I’m saying this: I’m all for experimentation, and originality, and newness, and creativity (lord knows, I changed my poetry style once per month last year and am constantly trying out different voices myself), but only if it has any effect. I measure the success of a poem by how much, or in what way, it impacted the reader, as opposed to how much intellectual gimmicks I could throw in there and expect to get away with. I hate purely abstract art because it is something life is not: absolute. We do not live in absolutes; we live in shades and colours and glades and textures. In things new and old. We do not live in the ‘completely new’; we do not live where there is ‘utter anarchy.’ To feel, to think, to be moved, to see, to have what we see and hear and think and feel as having any kind of meaning (read: order) or effect, it must have something we can relate to by some kind of past experience. That’s why you wrote this poem in English and not Swahili, correct? I think borders exist in both natural and social (complex) systems -- by which I mean ‘boundaries...walls’ as you call them. But I also believe that in art, you can take them and mold them. Why destroy the line (read: border) of the horizon when there is so much breathtaking beauty in exploring it?

That was point one. For art to be a reflection of reality, life as we know it, and for art to have any kind of effect, it must have chaos and order. It is entirely up to the author as to the quantity and quality of each, so long as there is at least a bit of both. You hate ‘absolute perfection’? So do I. You realise both absolute order and absolute chaos are both forms of, well, absolutism? In which case, we must write with both, for art to be as bizarrely and simultaneously subjective and objective as the reality it depicts.

[2.]

high art is increasingly transparent and lacking any real connection to the greater reading audience; simply put, most of the work put out is jargon and disestablishes itself from those that would attempt appreciate it. Some say this is a delineating effect on art and a decreasing level of skill; I would agree only that the small esoteric circles and concentrations of artistic ability and skill do not exist any longer and the control over development has all but nearly disappeared. This is why I believe experimental work and art to be my forte, because it removes all boundaries and walls and demands you create them and you take it upon yourself to be truly connected to the culture and time of your life.

Tell me, how much ‘high art’ have you actually read/seen/been in touch with? And also tell me, how much have you actually written to say that ‘experimental work is my forte’?

Once again, I’m not convinced anyone is ever ‘truly’ experimental. How can you be, when what you write now is the product of past experience, past thought, past insights, past feelings -- i.e. is a result of something, is a result of upbringing/experience/existing knowledge; you realise that if anything is a result of something else, it is the product of a logical (read: orderly) sequence of events that, in some way, led you to write whatever it is you are writing?

Only children who have yet to learn the names for things, yet to have experiences that are not removed from memory, yet to be taught anything are truly ‘experimental’. That’s the only stage we can have ‘true’ experimentation, true chaos, true anarchy -- because there is no logical follow-on of events, no (or little) order.

Just look a little more critically at the bigger picture before jumping to assertions, please. There is a fairly good reason I am devoting an entire lifetime to the study of complex systems -- because it underpins just about anything and everything.

[3.]

Your poem:

The lost line the Road

Odd and selective capitalisation aside, I love the double meanings of this. I read it in two ways: ‘those people who are lost are lining the roads’ and ‘the lost line: the road’ (i.e. that the road, the symbol of journey, is ‘lost’ somewhere -- we can’t find it; we don’t know where it is). Beautiful ambiguity. Could also read it as ‘the road is the lost line [amongst all the other lines we have]’.

(You will come to realise my love for dualities with time. Chaos and order. Double meanings. Head and heart. Light and dark. Mixtures, juxtapositions -- all because one-sidedness is boring.]

I.
I am the restless.
I am suppressed by the generation that delivered civil emancipation with the Howl heard round the world,
the “modern” generation that suppresses suppression by correcting expression, and
I am the restless generation where nothing is expressed.
I am condemned a rapist and sinner after a half attended TV dinner between an Internet habit and a hazy family drag, and
I am labeled a hacker by the opportunist preachers and political jesters that inhabit the screen when
I am one of Anonymous and labeled one of the many, grouped into a bite size statistic easy to digest, and
I will be martyred a saint and remembered for all of the things I am not.
I am the restless.
I am a pile-driver ramming into your earth, cracking and eviscerating the seeds I inherited called gods and democracy, choosing to abort the possibility of progeny.
And come morning, the oil is gone and the smell of fish, dry, and only Calliope at my side,
and I am the restless, leaving the nest a free bird in song.

You know my favourite lines? ‘I am condemned a rapist and sinner after a half attended TV dinner between an Internet habit and a hazy family drag, and’ as well as ‘And come morning, the oil is gone and the smell of fish, dry, and only Calliope at my side’ -- these parts exactly and entirely.

Do you know why? Because you hit chaos and order brilliantly in those lines. The rest is fairly stale in comparison. It doesn’t sing. Sure, it means something -- we can all see that -- but you will come to find that the part that means something without overtly saying ‘look at me, I mean something!’ are the ones that strike us the most. Make the meaning through what you show us rather than what you tell us. Your juxtaposition of something as shocking as a rapist and sinner with something as ordinary as a TV dinner and Internet habit and hazy family drag made me smile -- it sung to me; it showed me something, rather than rather obviously saying, ‘I am the restless.’ Yes. So what.

For all your talk of experimentation, this is what I find amusing (and, I suppose, irritating): the parts which work well -- singled out above -- are the parts with a dash more inventiveness (chaos) than the rest. The rest bores. The vertical line of ‘I’ down the page is boring, juvenile, even somewhat egoistic. That may well have been your intention, but -- and let me say this -- it looks ugly. Yes, beauty is subjective. But honestly, how do you hope to justify it, other than by hinting at any thematic machinations it is a part of? Here’s what I want from you: have a real think about what makes us tick. How can you best manipulate the audience? Do you disgust them with something that does not interest them in the least and then, like a cheap salesperson, say, ‘but, see, it was for an intended purpose (theme)’ -- i.e. do you try to appeal to their ‘head’ without getting to their ‘heart,’ or do you, instead, first appeal to their sensibilities, as swiftly and as efficiently as possible, and then (and, if you’re really good, simultaneously) address matters of the ‘head’/intellect? Chaos and order -- now that we agree, (if we agree) that we need both, which should come first?

Tell me, how much can you say in a poem that hasn’t already been said somewhere, by someone? You talk of a restless generation in the very first lines -- an intellectual concept; you address the head first. You follow through with more things that address the head -- civil emancipation, suppressing suppression, correcting expression -- but do you realise, that yes, we have indeed heard this vein of thought, in this order before? That’s the problem with having such a large stretch of ‘head’/‘intellect’ -- there’s nothing to (a) make anyone remotely care, because you didn’t appeal to anyone’s sensibilities, because it doesn’t seem like you care about them and (b) all head / all intellect = all order, which is not what you want, because we can already foresee the next step in your thinking because it is logical. The only reason why it got better at the following line with rapists and TV and god-knows-what-else was because you actually make the reader smile there. You make them tilt their heads and laugh about the impossibility of daily existence, about the madness of our everyday paradoxes. You make us laugh about something. You make us feel. You actually stop and address the heart there; you throw in an element of unpredictability (chaos) to your cool intellect, your cool anger, to your cool (and boringly predictable) intellectual thesis.

And then, just when you’ve offered us some emotional lightness (which, in turn, creates holistic depth to the poem by balancing intellect with emotion, order with chaos), this is what you give us:

I am labeled a hacker by the opportunist preachers and political jesters that inhabit the screen when
I am one of Anonymous and labeled one of the many, grouped into a bite size statistic easy to digest, and
I will be martyred a saint and remembered for all of the things I am not.
I am the restless.
I am a pile-driver ramming into your earth, cracking and eviscerating the seeds I inherited called gods and democracy, choosing to abort the possibility of progeny.

...something again far too predictable. I want to challenge you. Give it more variety. It’s interesting, because the only way out to do this is to actually put some ordinary things in there (something along the lines of TV dinners and dry fish) because at the moment, you’ve got all these macro-concepts being tossed about in intellectual disgust, and the only way to offset too much macro is to have something at the microscopic level of the individual, rather than generations (‘saints,’ ‘opportunist preachers’ and ‘political jesters’ are all generalities -- nothing that the individual reader can remotely connect to easily, or in such quick succession). Macro and micro. Head and heart. Order and chaos. You keeping track of all this? Because there’s another one coming:

I am the restless.

By my line of reasoning so far, ‘I am the restless’ is repetition, hence in the realm of order, and, in this case, in the realm of intellect, despite it depicting (or attempting to depict) what is clearly an emotion: restlessness. It’s in the realm of order because it is intellectualised. Named. Labelled. Were you not to say it at all, and leave the wild flow (read some Siken to help) to convey restlessness all on its own, that would not only be far more effective, but would also actually far better convey the emotion than the word itself. Words, when used the way you’ve used that one there, take on a fairly literal, stagnant, flat, one-dimensional meaning, especially with regard to things as abstract/‘heart-oriented’/chaotic/unpredictable as emotions. So don’t use it when it serves no purpose. Does it make me see restlessness? Yes. Does it make me feel it? No. So, what’s the point of seeing an emotional without feeling it? Cut the repetition and be more inventive with how you convey an emotion since this is one area where you can’t afford to murder the ‘heart’ of the poem.

Ah, and I was about to introduce you to the next duality (of course, these things are by default members of ‘multiplicity’ as opposed to mere ‘duality’, but if you don’t even have the duality sorted, I don’t see much point in introducing the other things just yet): internal vs external. You have an emotion. It’s internal. To convey the emotion, you don’t say, ‘I am restless,’ because that would be attempting to label it from the inside out -- something that nobody will actually understand, because emotions are, by default, subjective and hence your version of restlessness could be different from mine, and so the word means relatively little. It does not make me care about your restlessness at any rate. Here’s what you do: to depict the internal, use the external. I love personifications of imagery -- guess why. Because it’s using the internal to convey the external. Obviously, the reverse works just as brilliantly, too -- using imagery (something external) to invoke feeling (internal). Notice the way you yourself used dry fish and Calliope and sinners (all external things) to bring life into what is essentially an internal thing: this restlessness.

I will look at this poem as a whole, too, after I’ve taken it part by part further, depending on how much time I have. But I think that’ll do for now -- enough to think about, and take in, and take out (via discussions, questions, arguments, anything -- PM or post below). See what you can do with it from what I’ve given you. Look at the following sections taking into account everything I’ve talked about so far. Change it as you want.

Good luck. Of course, I will be very interested to hear your thoughts on all this.



Navita

Careful what you put in a spoiler, especially if you want me to respond to all of it, everything you mention. You talked of experimentalism; that's why I addressed that, in the context of chaos and order, partly because I feel like I may have been somewhat too misleading about my view of poetry in earlier correspondence with you (I like experimental; I just don't think true experimentation exists, or if it does, it means little to the everyday person -- more detailed bashing of this above, obviously), partly in response to half-chewed out conversations in that regard in chat (for the sake of completeness), and partly thanks to something you may have mentioned about to the State Poet you met recently. Chaos, I think, was the word. Regardless, I took this poem as a poem without properly looking at the extent to which it experiments, and that is because it honestly does not matter. If it sings, it sings -- however subjective such an assessment may be.

Hence the first few paragraphs above -- just things about my way of thinking that you need to keep in the background when reading a critique. You can't know me without hearing me harp about chaos and order at least once. Most of it is a general approach to thinking and poetry, as opposed to anything specifically directed at this particular poem -- although it certainly helps, later, to keep it in mind -- and, also, partly for your (philosophical/critical/analytical) benefit. The fact that it was general should have been clear from the fact that there was nothing quoted!

But alright -- experimentalism aside, I don't see which poems aren't streams of consciousness in some part, any part. Obviously, I'm going to warn you again with the words you use -- I'm sure you've heard from Kylan enough the power of a word -- especially in how you view the poem yourself. Think about it like I would: what does 'stream of consciousness' mean? It is fairly single-sided -- the dualities that I so love cannot be there -- it means 'continual thought or thought of emotion' -- i.e. internal, thought, 'head,' 'intellect,' and, strangely enough, order, because thought generally does follow a logical process.

Now, I take this poem. Agreed, it is very 'head' oriented, very internal. Not much heart, and you know why: imagery (external) is lacking, and it is the external that best conveys that aspect of the internal. Despite the clear run-on sentences, there is order, and I can quite easily affirm this because it gets predictable after the first few lines. You actually need more disorder here, a little more chaos. For that, you need imagery that bounds from your thought in such a way so as to see madness and the entirely possible in one -- mad logic; that's poetry at its best, precisely because it's ordered disorder. disordered order -- a paradox. To delight, to move, to re-sensitise, we must be confronted with something new, something intriguing, something unpredictable -- there is little feeling in direct logic, predictability. Make wild associations. However, in this case, 'disorder' would involve bringing in not what is not ordinary per se, just what is not ordinary in your poem. You've got macro, intellectual concepts. For disorder / newness / heart you need micro imagery. Macro concepts, micro imagery. You follow? It's not a cookbook formula; it's just the approach I'd recommend for this particular poem. Micro does not mean small -- it could mean the ordinary, the everyday, the seen-and-touched; it is all in the timing, the juxtaposition of the two things that we don't just have the duality -- we have the paradox, the point where everything overlaps and merges in with each other, rather than fragments.

P.S. I love paradoxes. I love them more than dualities.

Preamble and summary of above crit finished. Now:

II.
Slogging through in the sun's hangover
down an Old Church Road, worn
leather soles rubbing viscous acrid vomit,
that lines the cracked concrete street
I meet after yet another indulgence.
I fumbled blindly to find these shoes
that weren't mine, at the foot of a
bed. GetoutGetoutGetout-
was the only thing in my head.

The restlessness of the new generation, the wandering, the lostness that we were introduced to in the first part could have been done far more succinctly. Remove anything extraneous. If it looks like it's a natural association anyone would make, remove it. If the words are too similar, remove some, remove all but one; change. Same goes for this part: too much similarity, and I want variety -- slogging, hangover, worn, cracked, viscous, acrid, vomit, fumbled. It got predictable after the first two (in any case, they were in too-quick succession to have any kind of effect). As before -- predictability/order = head which tends to murder any heart. I don't feel any of this. I don't care. I want to see something I haven't seen before -- actually, it's easier than that: I want you to show me something I've seen a thousand times in a different way. Repetition is only a powerful tool if used effectively, and I can assure you that it is very, very difficult to use it properly without boring the reader. It doesn't just have to be repetition of the same word; it can be repetition of a concept, a way of thinking; just the natural associations that anyone would make. These don't sing. They remind me of my Commercial Law class; all common sense, straightforward, almost too easy to be stomach-able.

Also -- on a semirelated note -- tell me why I read poetry, why anyone reads poetry. To think, move, be moved, feel? (All internal things). And we do this how? Through our senses (external) -- the strongest one being sight. For sight, we have imagery/ the aesthetic. Now, here's the conflict: all art is based on conflicts (or, you know, dualities which coincide and lead to conflicts / paradoxes); all art is based on suffering, which this poem doesn't fail to depict; all art is based on the continual individual struggle. But at the same time, we read poetry for pleasure, not just the pain; we read it for catharsis, for being, at some point, uplifted, inspired. There is the greatest gift any poem can give to a reader: inspiration; the desire to create something new.

So...how do you reconcile these two ideas:

1.) Poetry must be composed of chaos/order or dualities or paradoxes or conflict or suffering in order to be meaningful, interesting, an accurate representation of the multishaded reality as we know it, and

2.) Poetry must uplift the reader in some way, must pertain to their sensibilities, delight, inspire (but cannot be an entirely 'happy' poem, because then there is no conflict, hence no story, hence no movement)?

Here's an easy solution (in reverse): for pleasure/uplifting/seeing something new/imagery/inspiration, there must be the aesthetic, and for that, there must be imagery and this imagery must be, in some way, pleasing to our senses -- i.e. beautiful. At the same time, we want conflict. Solution (you should have guessed this by now): there must be beauty in suffering, catharsis in the depiction and resolution of conflict; all stories/poems, regardless of how bleak and hopeless the reality that they depict is, must sing. That is the necessary contradiction that literature must face if it is to work. We must appeal to the heart in order to draw in the reader and keep them in, no matter how terrible the themes ('intellect' / head) of the piece may be. This is where mimicking content with style will not work.

I see little beauty in suffering here. I see a lot of suffering, and when it's all there, packed together like that, it's repetitious, intellectualised, logical, boring. The first stanza of the second section, at any rate, is too predictable. No impact.

However, the line, 'Nature greets me with a kiss on the street' almost meets it, but falls just short. The lines 'I think I slept with someone that looks like her,' and 'I nearly die, a foot from being bumper's road-meal, / yelled at by the driver of a Rolls Royce' made me smile because of their total unpredictability (which, I will stress, is entirely subjective). They were perfect; they are beautiful.

Where am I? I should ask, but never consider.
I will walk freely in streets with these anti-social social
hemorrhaging, decaying things that are people by day,
and wanderers like me, by twilight. And
I am their pariah and arbiter of their fear for their childrens' future,
because in me they desire freedom, freedom from
a prison of decision and indecision, because
I am ahead of their curve and they are
too afraid to walk astray when they tell their children
to follow the line and they know it is a line and a line
marking the bars of the cell in jail, and they cannot embrace reality past
the curtain after the play, and see cyberspace for
the void that night pales to compare. And outside

Watch: antisocial, social, pariah, arbiter, children’s future, fear, freedom, desire, prison, decision, indecision, follow the line, jail, reality, cyberspace, void. All macro concepts, pitched at the level of societies. How do you hope to address the individual with the societal without making it read like a law text, or a thesis? Even ‘haemorrhaging’ didn’t work because you stuck ‘decaying’ on the end of it too quickly, and decaying ties in too easily with the concept of societal decay, large-scale things.

No heart, here. No point of difference. Suffering with no beauty.

Nature greets me with a kiss on the street,
Eurus' wind is another bitch on my skin
coupled with bristling, spearing hail and rain,
and I'm lost seeing these “Zoloft”, “MAD”, & “Viagra”
ads and signs for the first time. And I'm
wondering if there's a (way) home again.
And I'm content, because I am lost.

Save ‘Eurus’ wind is another bitch on my skin’ for a different stanza opener. Your first one is good; don’t have two in a row. It’s like having two fantastic beginnings one after the other, which sort of cancel the individual effect of any one. There are more intellectual flagella here -- ‘bristling, spearing hail and rain, / and I’m lost...And I’m content, because I’m lost’ -- remember what I said about labelling an emotion / telling it will ultimately intellectualise it? You stimulated my interest again by bringing in modernities, ‘Zoloft,’ ‘MAD’, ‘Viagra’ (ha, that ampersand is such a pretentious gimmick; what impact is it meant to have, pray tell? nothing except intellectual fun on the part of the writer...I don’t feel particularly excited by it at any rate) but it was just the relative context of the whole stanza that failed to make them sing much.

My ambling marathon to nowhere jogs nothing,
not-withstanding generous Zeus's wake-up shower (my idol, his rain, approval);
that I don't mind. Out of the corner a woman sees me, spies me
spying her, scowls at my smile, and scurries past the slow
sight of my eyes; and I think I slept with someone that looks like her, once.
“Get out of the road!” and I nearly die, a foot from being bumper's road-meal,
yelled at by the driver of a Rolls Royce; I've
been wandering in the road since my pap told me
it was cheaper than sitting at the back of the bus, and
I think it's a pity the driver didn't hit me
and slow down and enjoy life.

It was 8 years ago, or however many fingers I have up
And the bottles shining in the evening sun began to make a rainbow
on my face each night, when art & life made way to become
a jackhammer

This above part would have to be the most continuously entertaining section I’ve read from you yet. Bolded are the best parts -- the other things could go quite easily, or be snapped tighter in. It’s extraordinarily mad, in a weirdly logical way -- jogging juxtaposed with Zeus, sex and a road-meal, wander and Rolls Royces, ‘pap’ and death. Ordinary and micro with the macro. Really good stuff. Conveys the haphazardness of the reality for the youth perfectly, beautifully, with conflict in every single line, and beauty in every line too, to balance it, to uplift it, to make us teeter on a continual seesaw of thought and feeling and aesthetic.

Ha -- ‘however many fingers I have up.’ Full points for making me laugh.

of self-destruction, naivety and innocence drowned in a bucket,
beat out by a hammer, savored in women and men's skin,
and my dreams took a walk down winding paths to the dark hovels
Momma' said'd drop me dead; that funny gal, I saw
her go into them each night, when she always forgot to welcome me to
gentle Sandman's sleep. And I reasoned I was misguided.
I was just being a good Momma's boy, since pap committed suicide.

I should be dead, says my gut cringe & twinge, a lime colored slime
sliding with my liver under the pallid vest I treat like used toilet paper.

Oh no. Too much of the same thing, too close. Self-destruction, naivety and innocence drowned, beat out by a hammer, lust, dark hovels, death, suicide, death again, gut, cringe and twinge, slime, liver, pallid, toilet paper. Too much blackness and not enough colour here. Only little parts help offset it -- sandman’s sleep, good Momma’s boy. But that’s it, essentially.

It’s not even that it’s too negative for too long; I know you could perfectly easily argue the same for the preceding part that I enjoyed immensely. It’s that this part is negative, like the other but predictably so -- the effect it has is too predictable. The other one -- I couldn’t have known what was coming, and I was shocked, surprised, amused, saddened. In this above part, I don’t feel much -- or, at least, I am not aware of feeling, because I am not aware of any change in feeling. So it’s not just what you’re writing; it’s also what I’m feeling.

Reader-writer-text relationship. Conversation topic for another time, monsieur.

“You should be dead” says an old man, sitting inside the metal and glass bus-stop box
I smack my face into.

Lovely.

My body topples wistfully, greeting old friend cement
and I lay there rigidly like an artist's broken manikin, and
I'm drawn to the ground with those worn leather shoes that
aren't mine. “Get out my way!” and I'm helped, with an iron toed boot

Nope. Too similar to the above part with, “Get out of my road!”

[On that note, I’d like to mention that dialogue is extremely tricky to do well in a poem, and I think you did it fairly seamlessly in that Very Bolded Section.]

a fat bureaucrat, who wears his Sunday soot on Monday so he thinks
he smells nostalgic like grandpa, and no one can smell Mephistopheles on his soul. I know him,
from pictures by beds and on screens, and
I probably slept with his wife years before they met; it's always consensual
in euphoria and waste, so it's easier for good friends to forget.

And I return to the road, hand on my gut and hand on my head, I am dancing
with the green liquor fairy paying me another visit in the shadows the sun hides from
where none of the masquerading day humans can see, I, out in the road, and they
say I am blind walking with the cars, and I laugh because
I am dancing not walking, because I know and do not know where I have been because
they deny me identity when labeling me free, dropping me from
Lady Liberty's crown and say Athena will catch me before the Ground
if I repent for their wasted cowboy smallpox blanket diplomacy, so graciously lent,
and if I mend my ways and show responsibility and label selfishness a business opportunity;
because God's eyes are always watching, but God has no eyes to give
and those lining the way remove their eyes and walk in a land of the blind
in a time with no sight, in a date with no place, and the drivers are always driving
but with no vision of where they are going, and the pedestrians are hurrying and worrying
of the fear of the unseen self-fulfilling prophecy, until one with eyes has found them and
they SHRIEK in pity and defense for their blindness, and the children are given a map and told only
to never wander into the road and follow only the lines made in the light,
and they follow tragic misled Oedipus and pluck their sight.

And VOILA, we have another winner! Hard to read at first, because of its visual density, but I daresay I like it through and through. You lean towards macro quite a bit, but it’s interesting because it’s not nearly as predictable -- it’s charged, energetic, like an argument that strikes louder and louder with every line -- you’re allowed some leeway.

A quick note: ‘I probably slept with’ was great, but I’d caution you against using the same brilliant line / idea twice. ‘so graciously lent’ didn’t do much for me. Tone down the Greek a notch, because it’s not yet been alluded to at all that I can recall in your poem, and it seems odd to haul it in in this crucial part.

But I loved, ‘hand on my gut and hand on my head,’ (which I took great pleasure in misreading as ‘gut in my hand on my head’ -- I love being made to misread! it’s duality ), and the flow of the lines from that first one spills out like this ‘green liquor’ you talk of wonderfully. Enjambment at ‘and I laugh because’ was perfect; just the short breath we need before plunging right back into the whirlwind of imagery, and repetition of ‘because’ DOES work here since it’s staggered with enough distance and enough variability. Ha -- ‘label selfishness a business opportunity’ -- oh, the juxtaposition of business and the Greek goddess; I couldn’t think of anything more inventive. And this: ‘drivers are always driving but with no vision of where they’re going, and pedestrians are hurrying and worrying.......’ and all the way to the end -- it spirals us round and round this vein of thought and action and leaves us gasping. The balance is very carefully arranged -- purely by accident, I’m sure, but careful, nevertheless.

In short? Worth getting to the end of this section! And thank you, for at least some parts that delighted me, amused me, confused me, whirled me. As for the rest -- think about what you want to do with them. Let me know. We can discuss.


Navi

Hey you.

I know, most people probably always say this to you but I'm not most people. Trust me, I go out of my way not to say this.
But, this isn't a normal case. Trust me, when someone request a review, especially in my thread, I have it done right after you say it. *Zoom* Yeah like, cha bang~POOF! And your like,

Waah? Wait, she's done? How on earth could she serve up something so tasty so quick? I'm like, yeah whatever, I'm awesome.

So I wasn't expecting a week with practically no access to iternet right after your review request, and trust me, I'm not trying to get out of everything, 'cause I admit. I wasn't looking forward to this. I mean, your work is freaking amazing *Goo kagi, lay it on thick* but *gulp* Have you seen the lenth of this yoke?

Anyway, this review is a full on ramble. I'll get on to the review now. Trust me. *Gee, I say that a lot all part of the plan*

I'm not great with poems but I found this a tad jumpy. The subject was hay-wire. One minute we were on what you were and then we're on to this ramble of you walking down a street after a hangover? I had to re-read for ages until it finally clicked but even now, I'm still rather confused. As I said, I don't really write poetry or understand it but I know a good poem when I see one. I just, this really had me twisted. But your description was lovely. Aside from that, I'm not so sure. Within each paragraph I could see totally what was going on and the feelings and emotions of I but when you were done with that paragraph and went on to the next one, I lost it again. I kind of know the general gist of the poem~The I is trying to find itself throughout its mistakes basically?

The structure inwhich you wrote it was rather strange and I think with a slight intro to each new stanza, retarded people like me will eventually understand the situation

In this really long line;

and I am martyred for something I am not, and I am expressed in nothing but denial by the generation that reared me and feared me and taught me to hate all that I stood for, and so I took the road between Broadway and Iraq, and I forgot about political parties and cared nothing for Jesus or Stalin or Mao, and I cried for the restless generation which has no voice and
I left my signature on the road to fester and boil for the restless to find.

Number one, there wasn't one single full stop in that whole thing. I found myself grasping for breath by the time I'd read through. Defiantly consider placing a full stop somewhere in there. Its just basic grammar, forgot all the ands and comma's, full stops make things a little easier on you and the readers.

Also, I found you quite distant here and in other parts. What were you a martyer for? Did I miss something or are we just supposed to figure it out? I didn't think it was very clear throught this little rant?
Remember that no matter how sure you are of your idea's, we aren't inside your head and we are the most important people here.
The same way you constantly repeated; I am the restless. As I always say, as a writer or a poet our job is to paint a picture for others with words. We shoudn't tell through our writing but show through our writing. I think if you interpreted that into this poem it would have so much more depth and meaning to it. Help us try and uncover the meaning of it's restlessness. For being restless is merely an action, tells us nothing about the charachter or demeanor of the person itself. Uncovering the true meaning in a poem is the fun part. Don't give it all away in one blunt,bland line.

I liked how you used words with double or hidden meanings behind them sometimes. I had to try and figure out what possibility it could be and I think that was what I most injoyed. The sense of unawareness in this. It could mean this or this or a whole list of other reasons. I really liked how you wrote most of it and those sneaky words you dropped here and there really made all the difference.

All in all, you did a grand job on this. I'm pretty awed at your skill. As I said, I know a good poet when I see one.
Keep writing and good luck!
Kagi x