Thoughts of a Call-Girl

love,
have I ever told you
how the men at the pool
molested the grass
to be beautiful?
And unwind
with me love,
did you know I kissed
a million children
while they slept?
Some say
I'm desperate, but
underneath these clothes
and that flesh cell,
you're as lonely
as me,
love.

*loves this one*

Hiya,
This is great.
I love how you handled a sensitive topic in a mature way.

how the men at the pool
molested the grass

This is beautiful, you've captured a raw emotion in a practical way. I don't quite fully understand it, but maybe because I'm a bit thick like that

Some say
I'm desperate,

This is really nice too. I think that people stereotype call-girls as people who are disgusting and dirty, when in fact that is their job. I mean, obviously it isn't the best way to work, but it's good how your poem is a different view to call-girls.

you're as lonely
as me,
love.

I really enjoy this line. It's open to interpretation and that's what great poetry is about. A poem doesn't have to be about a solid topic. You could say that a call-girl is just like anyone else, and always lonely in life. She just needs something or someone to stop feeling lonely. Sorry, going off the topic a little here..back to the poem!

I love the idea of a "flesh cell" It's like kind of creepy bones and flesh. It also suggests a cage in which she lives in. Her own body being like a prison cell that she can't escape from.

Anyway, really excellent, keep writing more poems and I shall be happy to read!

HAYLEY
xx

Wow! I really like this poem. I think the flow could use a tweak or two but overall it was great. Good job.

I'm not really sure on how I feel about this poem. I like the flow of it, it reads smoothly. But I can't pull it together and get the meaning. Great style, but still not sure.

Okay, first things first, the title is great, definitely good for getting attention to your poem, I like the address style, I will do my best (takes a deep breath) and review this in the sentences.

I'm gonna go all mean mr mustard here, without the mean....

love,
have I ever told you
how the men at the pool
molested the grass
to be beautiful?

the first, second, third, and fifth lines are good, but that fourth one, is definitely an interesting image indeed, molest as in touch or feel, or molest as in molest molest? And why would they molest the grass to feel beautiful? I would feel like a dousche if someone saw me doing that!

Now maybe the pool and grass and molest are metaphors, as I am pretty sure they are, (very sexual imagery if I am correct) you know what I mean...


And unwind
with me love,
did you know I kissed
a million children
while they slept?
Some say
I'm desperate, but
underneath these clothes
and that flesh cell,
you're as lonely
as me,
love.


you know what, screw this, I can't do ti, I don't get it... you have very strong words and a wonderful flow and atmosphere, but I can't put two and two together I guess

the "flesh cell" line is great, and the thing with the children is interesting, this is definitely interesting, great job, you win.

I must say, it's a nice change of pace to see something short from you for once. ;P

have I ever told you
how the men at the pool
molested the grass
to be beautiful?

Interesting word choice here with "molested" and all its negative connotations. I would have liked to have seen a bit more of this "thinly veiled but rather easily understood if you just look at it from the right angle" type of phrasing throughout the rest of the poem, rather than the blatantly obvious lines you ended on. Now, that wasn't to say the ending was bad, and it was a decent enough ending I suppose, but you were developing some lovely imageries and metaphors, and if you'd just developed them a touch more instead of simply stating the "point" of the poem in the second-last line, I would have liked this poem quite a bit more.

As it stands, you have just enough allusion to prevent this from sounding pretentiously "profound" or preachy, but not enough to lend the needed power to close with such simplicity. It would only take maybe an added word here, or a replaced word there, to shield the point from immediate view and add a more solid layer of meaning to this. Right now, the poem all but shouts to me call-girl realizing that the only reason her occupation exists is because lonely men (forcibly) created it.

Unrelated to my actual review, but I'm gearing up to do some poemizing myself this evening and started trolling the forum looking for mood-setting pieces. This worked swimmingly, so thank you!

I was struck immediately by the symmetry of this. Very deliberate, very precise, very stabilizing. And not just the framing of "love" (though that's certainly the most obvious thing, and what draws the reader's attention to the rest of it) but the structure of the three sentence and (my personal favorite) the placement of the commas. I think that may be my favorite thing about it:

love,
have I ever told you

and

as me,
love.

I get something satisfying out of the fact that basically mimicking the structure can create two such different effects (the first draws the reader in and the second has finality, or at least that's what I got out of it.)

As far as content goes, the greatest insight I read into it was in the line

how the men at the pool
molested the grass
to be beautiful?

It's a wonderfully unorthodox way of phrasing, but more importantly I liked the idea of a call-girl having a tendency to think of things in terms of molestation or abuse or even sex in general; I believed that would be true to the character.

You're getting some comments about pulling the whole piece together. For me, the style lent that reader's satisfaction of finishing a complete story, but maybe the void comes from trying to strip the piece down to content alone? We do learn very little about the call-girl, and nothing...I don't want to say surprising, because I think the content you did provide is poignant. But it didn't lay the character bare or define her. I would believe that there are more intimate or honest thoughts from the call-girl to be expressed (provided that she is speaking honestly.) If the voice is more dubious than that, then maybe that's the discrepancy that creates the dissonance.

Loved the image of the "flesh cell." My nitpick is

And unwind
with me love,

because the vagueness of "unwind" tripped me up. My mind didn't know how it wanted to take the image of that. I like the sexual connotation of it because that aligns with the molestation of the grass, but I second-guessed myself on whether or not I was reading too much into it in that direction. I didn't know if I could take the word physically or in terms of unwinding honestly, and ultimately just didn't have a mental image that I could get behind.

Beautiful word choice. You have a lot of poise. Thank you for the read!

Quasi

You handled a sensitive topic, often associated with sleaze and candid humour, very surprisingly beautiful. I love the repetition of "love". I loved this most definitley. Well done and keep up the great work. The line about the childen almost broke my heart BTW!! xx

Reminds of William Carlos Williams as only a simple poem carrying the weight of the world on its shoulders can. It seems to me that here you attempt to tackle the concept of love itself, not merely the lifestyle and cleverly corresponding of a prostitute. You question the nature of love very cleanly and without guile. This theme is evident from the head and tail repetition of the word, which I'll come back to later. First, I want to expose this poem.

love,
have I ever told you
how the men at the pool
molested the grass
to be beautiful?

Great. Here, I think that you've captured a tremendously modern voice and image. This passage speaks volumes on masculinity, modern society, insecurity. Is this call-girl, a woman engaged in the business of surface love, addressing a client? A genuine love interest? Or possibly love itself? On first read, your readers will interpret it as one of the first two, I think. That she is using the word love as a term of endearment. However, on closer inspection, I believe that this particular hussy is addressing that great antithesis of death itself, at least for the majority of the poem. Love is blind. Love is aloof -- a subject of pop-songs and storybooks. Love needs to be brought up to speed by one of its soldiers, one of its grounds-women. And then the image of men at a pool. What a civilized, impotent pursuit. These are men congregating in nakedness, engaged in the molestation of grass, an herb rampantly tamed by mankind, so raped of its nature already, that for it to be molested further seems laughable. Grass: the nearby nature. One can step into the world from the pool onto the grass and be renewed, because, according to eco-critics, it is a harmful fallacy to ignore the natural world in one's own backyard. To be beautiful. That search for beauty. The search for beauty with fellow human beings among the non-human. Is love a search for beauty at the sufferance of another?

And unwind
with me love,
did you know I kissed
a million children
while they slept?

Loosen up, love. Cool your heels for a bit. You are pretentious philosophy love, and you get in your own way. This is a more perturbing passage. The call-girl is the embodiment of moral degradation, a bastardization of true love, lust and rubbed darkness. But the call-girl is everywhere. She is universal. This false love has kissed the children of men while they sleep. It is unavoidable. It could also be a reference to kissing a penis I guess...the children being a sperm count. But that's a bit too blunt.

you're as lonely
as me,
love.

This part throws me for a loop. You're as lonely as me. The two loves. High love, low love. Prostitution is generally thought of as a lonely, empty, and I buy that. Do I buy that true love is lonely? Is love a selfish act? I won't get into that. You leave us with an awfully cynical, bleak perspective anyway. I would like to ask you if you've ever been in love before. I haven't myself, but it would be interesting to know whether this poem comes from someone relatively "experienced" in the licks of love.

But in the end, I think what we have here is a case of an unreliable narrator, a narrator defeated by her own lifestyle. Perhaps I believe this because I can't believe that love is lonely. I have not given myself so over to the existentialist's world of one. This is an intelligent piece, if it isn't a careful piece. I'm not quite sure I like the new direction of yours in the last three poems I've read, but I certainly enjoy it here. Productive experimentation.

Kylan

I don't have much to critique, all I just can say is: I loved it

My very first impression was simply: “This is Not How a Call Girl Feels”.

How could you possibly know? How could you ever hope to portray genuine insight from one of these women? I know that you have never been one, and it is highly unlikely that you have tracked one down to interview her (unless you’re a frequent customer of that variety, which is an entirely different can of worms). None of the realities of your speaker’s profession are touched upon. None of the specific details of her life are provided. She is not an individual, she is a formula. She is an object, an archetype- The Hooker With The Heart of Gold. With such a large and unspecific scope there is precious little to prevent your poem from being just another mediocre entry in the “Boohoo Sad Prostitute is Sad” literary genre. You have insensitively generalized an entire group of feeling thinking people and in process come off as emotionally contrived.

Even if you meant for your heroine to be universal, and left her plain and unadorned for that purpose your approach is still too stylized to be believable. A hooker may have tender feelings and beautiful aspirations but her life is ugly and unforgiving. You have romanticized her tragedy instead of addressing it. She lacks the capacity even to connect intellectually with the audience. All her advances are perversely sexual even as she tries to convey her desire to transcend her sexual vocation.

The grass was “molested”, she wants you “unwind” with her, she “kissed” a million children as they slept. She wants you to take off your clothes to prove you are as lonely as she is. She calls you “love” as if you were a potential client. Her emotional confession is continually physically exploited.

Some say
I'm desperate, but
underneath these clothes
and that flesh cell,
you're as lonely
as me,
love.

The only allusion towards her own separate and personal emotions- feelings which do not spring physically from anyone else she has come in contact with, is the word “desperate”. And she turns the word on the audience as if exploring anyone else’s desperation was more important than exploring her own.

However, some of the language is still quite stirring. These three lines are my favorites:

how the men at the pool
molested the grass
to be beautiful?

At first I did not like the word “molested”. I felt it was too grossly multisyllabic. I kind of shivered and skimmed over it and pretended it wasn’t there. But then I went back and forced myself to dwell on it. I found that it called up very vivd imagery. Gentlemen sitting splay legged in the evening by the concrete edge of that pool. Their hands raking through the grass behind them. Bathed in the reflections from the water. Sipping warm beer. Predators satiated. In repose. It was a beautiful image. It was a frightening and lucid image.

You really carved your piece down the essentials and to a very aesthetically and rhythmically pleasing format. The narrative is smooth, uninterrupted, cyclical. Each word seems to deliquesce into the next. There is nothing superfluous. I applaud you for your deluge into minimalism.

I agree with butterfinger, it's a great poem but the meaning is a bit hard to understand. I feel there's a very powerful meaning behind it all, maybe I'm not thinking with the right kind of mind. However I wouldn't change anything at all.

Amazing. You're unabashedly adressing a subject that some even have trouble thinking about. You're diving right into it. I really like the seperation and the rythym. Though I don't entirely understand the whole poem, the emotion is clear. This was great!

I have been contemplating reviewing this for quite some time now so I figure I will do so now. I want to start off by saying I do love this poem. I think you did a fine job of conveying emotion through this, but I do have a few nitpics to discuss.

First of all you have beautiful imagery in the first part of the poem but you lose those in the last bit. It is very complicated and then very simple and I feel it needs to be one or the other.

Another thing is that I don't think I would have figured this out without the title. I mean I have read your work before and found it quite complicated, but I think there is a fine line of being purposly complicated and understanding. I write some complicated poems every now and again but I do like to keep some understanding there for the readers sake.

I think that the way you have your lines set up is wonderful. Even this adds something to your poem. I also like the line about the grass being molested.

Anyway that's all I have to say, I hope I helped in some form or another.

-Flow-