When the Sun Goes Walking

I grumble to Kamas about her excess of space poetry, and then I write this.


When the sun goes walking,
she sprinkles yellow roses and breadcrumbs
on the sidewalk so the world can follow her—
and each time a petal hits the ground it leaves
a dent in the pavement from the weight of being
just friends—but she can’t hear
the tears drying like I can, under the city’s pulse
and throbbing clouds. And somewhere, some kid kicks a plastic bottle
along the railroad tracks, and he decides it’s my fault
that she’s gone.

They say I’m a half-hearted reflection of her,
crippled and hollowed by razor-edged wishes that missed their targets
and landed on me instead, scooping out craters of dust and darkness
as easily as scooping out ice-cream.
But I don’t mind—my subjects count the hours
in cups of coffee and secrets that they think I can’t hear,
in dimming candlelight and drooping eyelids, their insides laced with fireflies.
You think you’re clever, barely breathing and clothed in night,
but you forget: I am night.

I like to watch the ones that move the slowest.
They have the most to hide.

Daydreams are cheap, spun impatiently by her flickering fingers,
with enough holes to sink a ship (and I would know—
I’ve watched marble palms grasp at waves
and slip right through, inky sky melting into inky sea)
The dreams I write, though, tumble tightly from my lips
and fester in the empty pockets of your mind, clawing away at memories
until the one I want rips away
and you stop fighting.
When you dream in my domain, you don’t get to decide the ending,
but I’m rarely cruel. And if I am, there’s no use shouting Pinch me
when I’m all the way up here.

Just look at her,
and see how long it takes until her smile
burns away your corneas and you’re blinking away blindness.
She doesn’t know what it’s like to sweep a hand across the sky
and come away with stars sticking out of your heart-line,
to have them cling brightly until you shake them off
and they dot the air like birthday sprinkles.
And she doesn’t taste the static in the humid night,
or see the blanket of fog that tangles behind your eyes
whenever I exhale.
She may be the bright side, but she never hears this—
this silence, as sticky as morning-dew,
dissolving on your tongues until every last one of you
is secure in sleep.

And sleep is mine.

Hey, Evi.

Since you were kind enough to review my short story, I thought that I would drop by and give this a quick review. Overall, this is a really good piece. You're definitely gifted when it comes to poetry. Like me, though, I think prose is definitely your strength -- not to say that this isn't good! You're a lot better then I am, that's for sure. What I love the most about this is the imagery and the metaphors/similes that you use. For instance, lines like these:

she sprinkles yellow roses and breadcrumbs
on the sidewalk so the world can follow her—

and these:

and landed on me instead, scooping out craters of dust and darkness
as easily as scooping out ice-cream.

make me shiver because they're described so well, and I can really picture them in my head.

Another thing I really like about this is the subject matter. You definitely have a good grasp on what you're trying to convey, and this doesn't seem like something you came up with on a whim. If you did, awesome! It does get a bit bogged down in places, though, but overall you know what you're writing about, and your ability to tell stories like this, I think, comes from how you write your prose.

My main problem with this lies within the flow/composition. I was trying to read to read this out loud, and I ended up stumbling in a few places and having to restart. There's not a lot of flow -- you try to stimulate some by cutting of your lines in funky places, and it really just makes it more clunky. It reads just like prose -- try deleting some excess linking words like 'and' and 'is', try using a few more adjectives and read it to yourself aloud as you revise. I shouldn't say much, because I struggle with this a lot too, but overall it just makes the poem harder to pay attention to and appreciate. You have to be especially careful in free verse -- it's easier to write, but harder to make flow.

Overall, I think this is a really great poem, especially considering that you haven't written one in so long. Anyway, I hope I helped, and feel free to drop me a note if you have any questions/comments. Good luck with your revisions!

~ Elinor

Hello there!

I would just like to say that this poem is really interesting. In parts such as:

I’ve watched marble palms grasp at waves
and slip right through, inky sky melting into inky sea)

and

But I don’t mind—my subjects count the hours
in cups of coffee and secrets that they think I can’t hear,
in dimming candlelight and drooping eyelids, their insides laced with fireflies.

,

they have really good imagery. I was literally seeing everything you wrote play right before my eyes. It was like a movie. A very interesting movie, mind you.

-Alix

Hi Evi,

First of all, the title can be absorbed into the first line of the poem or vice versa. You don't need to repeat.

What did you do, pull out one of your short stories and take a hacksaw to it? This piece starts to do downhill fast, right after the "But I don't mind". At that point, the words themselves create an atmosphere that makes it seem to the reader as if he's being lectured to by a gossipy sorority girl. "but you forget", "Just look at her", "you don't get to decide", and so on. It works in prose, when you want your audience to feel comforted by the cadences of everyday life - including the style of speech. But poetry shouldn't clothe itself in such unnecessary synchronization unless that's directly relevant to the theme being expressed, and it sure isn't here.

Imagery is okay but when you go from moon craters in one line to ice cream in the next, and never come back to the ice cream imagery again... then we have a problem. I think I used to do this at some point too, so excuse the hypocrisy. Your images should all make sense, all be connected to either the main point of the poem or to at least each other. Saying that one makes holes like an ice-cream-scooper is just insulting to the intelligence of the reader if it doesn't mean anything beyond what it says.

Italics, really? You shouldn't need gimmicks to make your case. Again, this can fly in prose because you want to illustrate the nuances of speech, but in most poetry that ends up looking artificial.

In general, I think it's kind of cray-cray how you think you can stuff a poem full of filler and not expect it to taste sour. This thing has stayed in the sun for far too long; I suggest that you compost these words and start over.

In a nutshell: chop, chop, chop. Get rid of all the unnecessary frills and outliers that clearly point to this as being a wannabe story instead of a poem.

Hope that helped,
Galerius