Sparks and Rushes to the Head

Much in the manner that Kylan is doing, I'm making a summer poetry thread here. Feel free to leave comments, criticism, etc, wherever you like on whatever you like. Most of this will be given a quick write up and light editing. However, after each poem I'll give a short explanation on what my intentions were in a spoiler tag. I'll be making a summer prose thread shortly after this one as well.

Moments

have I never told you

once I felt the weight
of the invisible
thousand pound gorilla,
once--like ten long years
that pass now like a day,
how the gorilla came
like age, to lay upon me
and my
wrinkled paper thin chest,

I still never recall
growing old with that
fucking gorilla everyday,
I'm now twenty but feel
like fifty,
and sometimes I miss
that gorilla
and write letters
to no one,

and the gorilla pulled
open my drawers
and tossed about my neatly
kept memories like candy
at an antique store; it cost
me a fortune, replacing
all of the burned bridges
in clothes that gorilla
chewed holes in.

did I never tell you as well
that I had mice in the attic,
as my only two friends
for seven years? their names
were Charlie and Ben,
one gray and the other
had a giant white beard;
they were based on photos
of relatives who lived
a hundred years before

and they said ice cream
from old photographs
taste the best to imaginary
friends, and I cried myself
to sleep that night, in an old
photograph, because I made
so many friends I could not
keep in one attic and so
the gorilla took me away
and I hated him for it,
and I ran away from attics.

did you ever know
I feared the day
I would leave home,
so I called it an attic,
calling the things inside
collectibles and oddities found
in antique stores, which
so many people carouse to find
trinkets thinking old things
really can learn new tricks,
and I feared leaving because foundations
are what homes build a family upon,
and the house chooses them carefully
because stairs like a spine can only
take so much mud from children's feet,
and blank canvas halls can only
hold so much fingerpaint
from a toddler's vivid imagination,
and walls can only hear
so many fights and back
breaking secrets until a house crumbles
around the wrong family, and really
it starts with love,

but did you never think
we're all lonely, just like
that fucking gorilla, I mean
he can't even be seen and yet
we all hate him and know he exists,
or maybe it's a she, who cares,
because how did it feel to love
everything you can lose--and
is still lost and fading away
between the pages of your
memories--when you wake up
one day still in a nightmare,
and no one really understands,
each person's private thousand
pound gorilla, not even me

except, when
we welcome them in
with a greeting card
and unpacking one ton
of baggage
like cement bricks;
that's the gorilla.

have I never told you
I snuck into your room
while you slept peacefully,
many years after we said goodbye
and I read the book you always
told me to read, the one
you kept on the shelf
about your life, and I skipped ahead
to the first page where you mention me,
and then to chapter twenty
to see if I still hung around, then
flipped the pages to three hundred,
because I wanted to know
if you ever thought about me
in your retirement; I could
not read the rest, because just like you
I love surprises and I swear when
I flipped the pages I could hear a person
sobbing. and really I was walking
in the lands of dreams then,
and just could not bring myself
to wake up, but

will you lose faith in yourself
if I told you you were as beautiful
as the gorilla I am passing onto you?
but don't worry, I have never told you
how easily papers crinkles
between these tired old fern hands,
that struggle now to pick fresh fruit
because it's easier to pop a bottle
and wake up thinking I can relive
yesterday, and when you ask me
to give you questions, I want to
look into the sun like Orion and
have my eyes stung by a scorpion,
because the right words can't be found.

have I never told you the only words
you will ever need in a life out of context

"We shall meet again--if we do meet again,
In the place where there is no darkness"

Spoiler

The ending reference to Orwell's 1984 displays the irony of this poem I've attempted to convey. A format as if a person is writing a letter to someone unmentioned, almost having a conversation, mentioning moments and episodes of life that illustrate the frustration of the "gorilla" and reassurance that despite not always saying the right thing, perhaps everything builds on itself even if we can predict nothing; this is by no means THE DEFINITE interpretation of the poem, I've left many things untouched but that's what a quick skim strikes in me

I'm sure you don't need me to remind you how brilliant you are, but I think I will anyway. This piece is fabulous. Look what happens when you have a bit of time on your hands!
I could rattle off the countless fantastic things about this piece, but I have a feeling you're already well aware of any contribution I could make.
Instead, I will make a miniscule critique.

like age, to lay upon me
and my
wrinkled paper thin chest,

I cannot understand the line break between 'my' and 'wrinkled'. The thought seems unnecessarily fragmented. Or am I missing something here?

K

Screw 1984.

This is lovely, though.

Palm Reading

I have seen this entire town,
reading the palm lines
in the cracks
and the folds
of my grandfather's hand,
and I have walked its alleys
in his life line from wrist to index,
and I kissed the memories
he left behind
the bed of the first housewife
he had an affair with,

and the wind blew my hair at midnight
walking by my side in silence
across an old man's town square. there,
no light dared
walk along our side, there
a town slept in its youth, while
the elderly dreamed, like
youth wasted on the young,
and I saw my grandfather
sleeping there on the sidewalk,
where the writers imagined
history could not be made;

I took a pen and traced the lines
on his skin, like a child's treasure map
of the town he has come to forget.

Spoiler

Written for Galerius.

Wordplay Exercise

I asked the messenger
"what is the taste
of the air that rests
on the end of the day?"
like he was Icarus
kissing the sun,
and he read a letter
like an auctioneer
draws breathe, before his
death. Round the barriers
of my bed, I have lead
a life of ant armies dancing
beneath a crystal moon,
that drink booze till noon
when winged messengers
cry in forsaken stables
it is time, it is time I read
from my whittling on
the legs of my rest, each
a notch for the dreams
I remember; it is too late,
I have auctioned my soul
before the sun died, do not
remember me each December.

Spoiler

10 minute write up, meticulously edited to exploit wordplay moments and opportunities, this is a lesson on what not to do in a poem; wordplay alone doesn't create a moment, it can only embellish and create flourishes.

This is beautiful, and though a little over my head I think I understand. It's about all the baggage we leave behind. A little bit at least. The gorilla is the reminder of those memoried we try so hard to bury. It's partly about wanting to forget loneliness. It's partly to want to know what happened to the ones we think we've forgotten or who have forgotten us. Am I way off or do I have something going here? Let me know.

You are beyond brilliant. I haven't been so drawn in to a piece of writing in so long!

MeanMrMustard wrote:because stairs like a spine can only
take so much mud from children's feet,
and blank canvas halls can only
hold so much fingerpaint
from a toddler's vivid imagination,
and walls can only hear
so many fights and back
breaking secrets until a house crumbles
around the wrong family, and really
it starts with love,

That excerpt was absolutely stunning! People usually use that word to descrvie something they can see but with your words you allowed me to see and think and feel all at once. Wow.

Also,

MeanMrMustard wrote:because how did it feel to love
everything you can lose--and
is still lost and fading away
between the pages of your
memories--when you wake up
one day still in a nightmare,
and no one really understands,

Wow. What can I say? They do say a picture is worth a thousand words but I think people underestimate the power of a word. The power of a group of words strewn together in a way that engraves them in your mind forever.

Now, remember I know nothing about poetry, so it might not be wise to listen too closely to what I have to say for myself. For now I'm going to review Sparks and Rushes to the Head. If you want more, you'll let me know.

So, I don't know if this was your intention, but your poem reads to me as a suicide note. The metaphorical gorilla refers to the sudden challenges and turmoil that drive the speaker to suicide. This forces a final revelation of the episodes of loneliness and inability to integrate and fear before death to indicate his feelings about life that he wants to tell the single person who he loved and admired about.

What I don't get is how your speaker suddenly felt the weight of the gorilla all at once. Surely it built up without your speaker ever realizing it was growing ever so slowly but ever so powerful?

Your imagery and word choice is always nothing less than poetic and the emotion it solicits is powerful. You're a wonderful poet, I think.

The build up of emotion is astounding and the poem crescendos beautifully.

I hope my review helped some. You wanted a good review, so I did my best.

Keep well!

I don't know how to start. I'll start by dismissing the third poem. I'm sure that it was a good exercise, but a lot of word play also relies on the associations that a person makes while writing, which is hard to get the reader to always follow along. It'll depend on the frame of mind, the path of thought that the reader takes, which is FASCINATING, because goodness, how can we direct someone the way we want them to go? Well, some people say we shouldn't. But if we shouldn't, then why should we try to write anything with a focus at all?

Mmm, I want to talk more about the first poem.

For me, this is the poem:

they were based on photos
of relatives who lived
a hundred years before

and they said ice cream
from old photographs
taste the best to imaginary
friends, and I cried myself
to sleep that night, in an old
photograph, because I made
so many friends I could not
keep in one attic and so
the gorilla took me away
and I hated him for it,
and I ran away from attics.

did you ever know
I feared the day
I would leave home,
so I called it an attic,
calling the things inside
collectibles and oddities found
in antique stores, which
so many people carouse to find
trinkets thinking old things
really can learn new tricks,
and I feared leaving because foundations
are what homes build a family upon,
and the house chooses them carefully
because stairs like a spine can only
take so much mud from children's feet,
and blank canvas halls can only
hold so much fingerpaint
from a toddler's vivid imagination,
and walls can only hear
so many fights and back
breaking secrets until a house crumbles
around the wrong family, and really
it starts with love,

but did you never think
we're all lonely, just like
that fucking gorilla, I mean
he can't even be seen and yet
we all hate him and know he exists,
or maybe it's a she, who cares,
because how did it feel to love
everything you can lose--and
is still lost and fading away
between the pages of your
memories--when you wake up
one day still in a nightmare,
and no one really understands,
each person's private thousand
pound gorilla, not even me

except, when
we welcome them in
with a greeting card
and unpacking one ton
of baggage
like cement bricks;
that's the gorilla.

have I never told you
I snuck into your room
while you slept peacefully,
many years after we said goodbye
and I read the book you always
told me to read, the one
you kept on the shelf
about your life, and I skipped ahead
to the first page where you mention me,
and then to chapter twenty
to see if I still hung around, then
flipped the pages to three hundred,
because I wanted to know
if you ever thought about me
in your retirement; I could
not read the rest, because just like you
I love surprises and I swear when
I flipped the pages I could hear a person
sobbing. and really I was walking
in the lands of dreams then,
and just could not bring myself
to wake up

These are the places where I'm interested. Of course, this poem needs the information about the gorilla, or the set up of the tone around it, and the mention of the things that are based on the old family relatives (so, like what the mice are right now), to keep the same meaning, but right now it feels like plain exposition.

Like, here. I wrote a story about two people robbing a graveyard and I just wanted to focus on the feelings they were having about doing it, so I skipped all the explaining stuff, but then no one got it. So I put in the explaining stuff, and then people got it, but when I went back and read it, it was boring and ugly compared to the prettiness of the stuff I was actually interested in. I'm not saying you weren't interested in the first part, the introduction of the gorilla, but it doesn't seem to come as easily to me as a reader as the rest of the poem does when I already know what the gorilla is like, when I already know where the mice are. I'd like a more engaging beginning. Right now I think it relies on the shock of the ugly word gorilla, and I think the ugliness of that word in a web of beautiful ones can do more than be a cheap hook. It works well later on, when you say things like "fucking", when you break into plainer language, because it shows something more raw, but it doesn't work at the very beginning.

What I love about this poem is that it moves easily between different thoughts through association. Like, it touches on so many different feelings, but they never feel out of place because I was led gently into them, leaving the old ones behind. In this section of the poem, there a couple of places that I still have bigger problems with. They're in red.

The first is about how the gorilla took the speaker away. In the rest of the poem, the gorilla is something that is near the speaker, something that makes him feel certain ways, but never has a direct effect on the speaker. Here, he seems to break into action that is too, well, active for what tone has been built around him before. And it doesn't really seem to serve a purpose except to mention attics again, but you don't need that, because right before that section is a mention of attics and maybe just a little something else will ease us nicely into the beautiful portion of a relationship to home.

Lemme break a little bit here. I absolutely love the clarity in that next section: I am afraid of leaving home, so I distance myself by calling it something else. It's reflected so many other times in the poem, even if we're not sure what the speaker means. What's the gorilla? Something the reader wanted to be distant from, and so refers to it with this mask. This is an essential clue as to how the speaker is handling things, and is really relevant to people at a lot of stages in life.

Okay, and the other is about the person sobbing, which I just think is irrelevant. First, it seems to be connected to loving surprises. If it's a separate thought, a line break might serve to better show the separation of the thoughts, but maybe not. Right now they seem to run together and the reader gets muddled in the association. Second, I don't see why it matters anyway. It's a really nice image, a really nice call to sound and fantasy, but in some way it doesn't fit. We don't know who the person is or why the speaker cares, suddenly, when the rest was him caring only about himself.

Just now I had the haunting thought that maybe it was the speaker hearing himself cry over the death of this person, finally toward the end, which is CRAZY and beautiful, but the words seem too distant to lend themselves to that explanation.

And then, generally, for me this is a reflection on family relationships. At first, too, I was upset that you had the spoilers trying to explain what you were doing, but it's okay. It invites more conversation on the poem, gives us more room to remember that it's not just about what was intended or what the reader sees. ANYWAY, I love the section I took out. Stop rambling. Move on to the next.

Palm Reading. The first stanza is so strong. The images take us in, the last few lines give us a taste of something we're not used to (sex and grandpas? come on), but then it doesn't go anywhere. The rest feels like related words repeated. Like the repetition of side really puts me off, and of youth and young. And the endings of the next two stanzas seem like word groups put together because they sound cool, but don't really mean anything. Imagined history could not be made. A town he has come to forget. The rhythm there has epic sound, but it's empty. I wonder what you meant by progressing through the poem this way. I wonder where the real ending is.

Maybe the problem is that you promised me something concrete with the bed and the housewife, and then flew off again into something harder to grasp. Maybe you can try continuing in the concrete and see which way is more satisfying for whatever message or feeling you were trying to share.

Alright, and back to the third. Like I said, a lot depends on how well you lead us through the associations, but we get left behind quickly. I think if we could capture the skill of leading readers through specific associations, we could tap into training their paths of thought and help them see specific things at other points in the poem. That that would be another purpose of word play instead of just silly flourishes.

WHOO ANYWAY.

I hope some of this helped.

Spoiler

here we are again

Everyman Status: Quo

in statu quo res erant ante bellum
-"in the state in which things were before the war"

Even a nobody like me
can learn to read, and in pretty things
they say the meek must die,
causation being needless existence
is an illogical vice, and it is only right
death be served quickly,
because might is the next beast in line,
the better hand rowing the boat, a freak
of nature that fits like a glove;
back when war was fresh and i was not an artifact
reading about war after the fact, to be an old glove worn
and tattered from falling up eight times
and only down seven; proverbs bobbing above
and below air, trying to fly but its wings are malformed
like three blind mice just looking, ah
irony, for something hard to drink.

We are bison at the pub, watching the same capitalist games
like wearing condoms to breed, padded men exercising
like tired Greeks in the shadow of Archimedes post Roma;
we murmur "ante bellum, ante bellum,..."
like seeing a Rosetta with a pretty face
who will kiss our lips like the rim of an old friend

and in that stillness we watched
the naked embers dance across the floor,
through the reflection in our half empty glasses

where emaciated souls ask “what makes
this life worth living if we must
die old?” and the soul meditates
on a pool of gin and bourbon.

This is the prayer washed down with rubbing alcohol
at four in the morning, the hangover elixir
for gargoyled souls stooping gleefully in cuckold misery,
gargling wretches choking on gravity, weighed down
by a lust for death, and if only they could fly
and roar like a dragon with forefathers, whisper
“let me—please, forget to breath”
—they will never stretch those wings, but swallow
words because they were not cut with vocal cords,
and stone is easier to accept
than flesh.

Alcohol is where time strings up
my masonry cut tongue,
like love for the fates,

tasting sickly sweet

we were wet from watching the hours
melt with the tracing hands across a scarred skin,
and i was asking you about the right hue
of paint for my living room.

i am now five years old,
some nights sitting crossed
legged in front of the bookshelf, the armoirie
of my inner world, where i can pretend
i am a blue baby for one more night,
glancing at beautiful letters
strewn on the innards of trees; sometimes
when i hold the pages to my ear i can hear
the sounds of a forest, let it chill my blue blood
and my heart beats, and i know no one has taken my arteries
and tried to make me alright; i am five
years old and love my imperfections, even if
i call them all dog.

i love dog, because
it was my first word,
and it
is an easy word

most of all for the emaciated souls to sing
in backmasked choirs “God, God, God, God,
God, God, God, God, God, God, God, God,
God…”

and i can tell you how a dog feels
in beautiful letters i learned from picture books:
dear reader, i feel shot between the breeze of
Your whimsy, and i miss Our debates and i wish
it wasn't so tart, to be shot. Oh well, i will try again
next year. In other news, i am remodeling my house.
i wonder if there will ever be another war.
Yours,
Everyman

and i will learn to flip the pages of fashion catalogs,
looking for appliances to help me match with paint
before i am six, because i am a scavenger
of exotic appliances and goods,
and i will browse department stores looking for something
i lost when i was born; but that isn't true, predestined
is knowing you will only get one serving, because Charles Dickens
isn't writing a novel on your life.

i have bought a gun today, but
i think i have written this for thirty years.

What's crazy is the first time I read this, I think I understood the second half better and this time I read it and could grasp the whole of the first half, but the second half trailed off. I hope you know where I mark the halves, because there is a distinct change of tone: "i am now five years old, ". Yeah, it's a concrete shift. Alright, turn around and we'll go through it one by one.

Even a nobody like me
can learn to read, and in pretty things
they say the meek must die,
causation being needless existence
is an illogical vice, and it is only right
death be served quickly,
because might is the next beast in line,
the better hand rowing the boat, a freak
of nature that fits like a glove;

At first, this was unassailable. I couldn't get in and couldn't find a meaning in these words, but if I trudge through slowly I pick it up. I feel like "in pretty things" comes out of nowhere and I don't know what it refers to, so it evokes nothing from me. I mean, the reason this was difficult, the reason I jumped to the second half last time was because this shows me nothing. The second half is full of more imagery for me to latch on to. But this is like exposition, an introduction. I see a little bit in "the better hand rowing the boat", and "might" as a beast describes what kind of hand, so we get that one quick image and personally I think it keeps us afloat. If you could clear away just a little of the wreckage around it (mostly "in pretty things"), we can move through the intro quickly.

back when war was fresh and i was not an artifact
reading about war after the fact, to be an old glove worn
and tattered from falling up eight times
and only down seven; proverbs bobbing above
and below air, trying to fly but its wings are malformed
like three blind mice just looking, ah
irony, for something hard to drink.

The problem is that THIS is what follows that. Unaccessible. I like the humor about the mice, and I can connect it to the rest of the poem, so it might be able to stay somewhere else if it can get tied in to something relevant. But I simply can't dig anything out of the rest of this half of the stanza.

We are bison at the pub, watching the same capitalist games
like wearing condoms to breed, padded men exercising
like tired Greeks in the shadow of Archimedes post Roma;
we murmur "ante bellum, ante bellum,..."
like seeing a Rosetta with a pretty face
who will kiss our lips like the rim of an old friend

and in that stillness we watched
the naked embers dance across the floor,
through the reflection in our half empty glasses

These two stanzas are BEAUTIFUL and perfect, grasping exactly where I want them to. There is smart language here: "condoms to breed", not to mention "bison", and then the imagery in the second stanza here brings us solidly into a place. We are satisfied with learning where we are coming from, from where the voice is speaking. The next stanza simply repeats what that three line stanza does much better and much more engagingly, so you can cut the emaciated souls and gin and bourbon.

This is the prayer washed down with rubbing alcohol
at four in the morning, the hangover elixir
for gargoyled souls stooping gleefully in cuckold misery,
gargling wretches choking on gravity, weighed down
by a lust for death, and if only they could fly
and roar like a dragon with forefathers, whisper
“let me—please, forget to breath”
—they will never stretch those wings, but swallow
words because they were not cut with vocal cords,
and stone is easier to accept
than flesh.

Beautiful beginning and beautiful ending, and I'm wondering why you want the middle. It could be a case like where you could take out that stanza. I think it, again works better and says the same message if you go from, "and if only they could fly" to "They will never stretch those wings". It might need something to pause in between, but I think whatever you'd splice in there would have to be more relevant or at least more accessible.

It's about striking a balance between stuff we have to decode and stuff that evokes something in us without us having to work toward it. If you can keep us floating on the rubbing alcohol long enough that we notice nothing when we start floating on the stone vocal cords (or lack), then you can slip us some telling in between, some of the graceful explanation like you had at the beginning. The problem is, each explanation is an obstacle and takes us down from our floating with every stumble we make in understanding. So you have to make sure to refresh us with something easier to grasp.

Alcohol is where time strings up
my masonry cut tongue,
like love for the fates,

tasting sickly sweet

we were wet from watching the hours
melt with the tracing hands across a scarred skin,
and i was asking you about the right hue
of paint for my living room.

I don't understand this as a sentence, but i love it as a set of images, absolutely. I just have no idea what it means. And the distress of that kind of tugs me down at the same time that the melting hours send me up, so it's a tense few stanzas. If you wanted to clean them up, maybe by making the sentence flow logically, it might, again, be easier to swallow or at least get our god man mouths around.

i am now five years old,
some nights sitting crossed
legged in front of the bookshelf, the armoirie
of my inner world, where i can pretend
i am a blue baby for one more night,
glancing at beautiful letters
strewn on the innards of trees; sometimes
when i hold the pages to my ear i can hear
the sounds of a forest, let it chill my blue blood
and my heart beats, and i know no one has taken my arteries
and tried to make me alright; i am five
years old and love my imperfections, even if
i call them all dog.

And this stanza, though it's completely different from everything before, is solid and beautiful. I especially love the grisly "innards" that still leave me with a feeling of peace. It's like a really small peep hole back to the first half of the poem, which is nice, and which is why I'm not saying "CUT IT ALL UP THESE ARE TWO SEPARATE POEMS". I feel like the two tones work well together and are part of the message, because that juxtaposition is what it's about. I wonder if you could weave them into each other like you did with that moment to make it seem more whole? Something to toy with.

The next stanza, again, perfect. A really nice dip into the voice, and just a simple thought you drag us through. But then...

most of all for the emaciated souls to sing
in backmasked choirs “God, God, God, God,
God, God, God, God, God, God, God, God,
God…”

and i can tell you how a dog feels
in beautiful letters i learned from picture books:
dear reader, i feel shot between the breeze of
Your whimsy, and i miss Our debates and i wish
it wasn't so tart, to be shot. Oh well, i will try again
next year. In other news, i am remodeling my house.
i wonder if there will ever be another war.
Yours,
Everyman

What the heccccck? :C I just. I can't get anything out of this at all. If anything, here's what I get: I miss the closeness we had when we were struggling, but now it doesn't matter. there's no war. we worry about stupid things these days'. So, I mean, I really like that tone. But what about the choir? I don't care about the choir and I get nothing from them. I get nothing from the word "whimsy", and "debates" seems too watered down to get me. It only gets its weight from the last line of the letter: war, but maybe you can start with that and weight the rest with it. You can consider it.

and i will learn to flip the pages of fashion catalogs,
looking for appliances to help me match with paint
before i am six, because i am a scavenger
of exotic appliances and goods,
and i will browse department stores looking for something
i lost when i was born; but that isn't true, predestined
is knowing you will only get one serving, because Charles Dickens
isn't writing a novel on your life.

i have bought a gun today, but
i think i have written this for thirty years.

Um. So we're coming to the end. The last stanza is awesome, another peephole to the beginning, the war soaked beginning, but thirty years seems too close. I feel like this wants to reach further back, to make it not just a shot gun over a glass counter, but a musket or something. A nice, wooden gun to match the table that the men had their half-empty glasses on.

The second to last stanza is so odd. I get the first part, and after the semi-colon it loses me completely. I get nothing from that.

What I'm saying is that it's so damn easy to get lost in this poem. I want strings everywhere so that I can hold on to one from somewhere, anywhere, anytime I get lost. If I understand the beginning, I want strings to the end anyway, so I can begin to understand the end as well. If the end captures me with its imagery, I want peepholes back to the beginning so the message can start to come through.

I really hope you can understand any of this, because I feel jumbled reading this piece and I'm sure it comes out in the review. Just lemme know if you have questions.

A Solipsist sees

i saw
the world curl into a fetal ball,
fit for a saint, but
much too honest, too personal for a shrink.
there you ask, curious
from clothes falling on the floor
"what did you see
between Belarus
and Champaign"
i saw
kaleidoscopes in deflection,
almost perfect mirrors drifting
in a world ocean soup almost perfect
to sip, where i dripped from a spoon
dipped in butterfly cocoons;
the effect a Rorschach reverberation:
too long i gazed into the world
from the viewpoint of a pen,
the world viewed back, again,
and i
did not come up for air,
i did not care, fetal, cramped.
i saw
the inside of a cocoon,
dreaming of the world like a prison,
deaf under the hush of the ocean.

Elzinore

I knew a midget named Elzinore,
who claimed he was picked up for possession
of stuffed animals; he was suspected
of kidnapping.
Elzin would wrap them, the torsos,
in plain white gauze and call himself
"El doctor de Medici" charged with
saving the souls of his cotton fleece flock.
Next he placed tiny little sunglasses
over their button tied eyes, tied a tie
with a hangman's solemnity, and kissed
each on the lip. He liked to pretend
they kissed back.
Zore had two stuffed animals, as he called them,
each month I saw him always carrying different ones,
the little tykes, in red, blue, yellow, polka dot, even
completely nude. I thought "a renaissance man"
with a hobby, and made nothing of it.
It happened so Elzinore was caught
dousing his stolen friends in gasoline,
setting them on fire at high noon;
they found him by the smell of burning flesh,
laying with scattered bones across the field.

I like you when you're at your most frank, sincere; I think that is when words sing to me the most, stripped of such cumbersome prerequisites like poeticism or imagery -- the way of saying it like it is and leaving it at that. I wouldn't say the poem blew me away, but I would certainly say that it is a complete little gem in itself, and did what poetry should do -- or what I expect it to do -- and that is to delight, surprise, leave one thinking, touch, if even for the briefest moments. This is intimate, so burnt and singed lovingly with character in every line -- it's a quality I often look for in your work, and am often disappointed to find is lacking, but I think you do it well, here. Certainly one that leaves me wondering; an intrigue born not of habit in intellectually stripping away the work, but from a genuine concern for the narrator and main character; a 'head' derived from 'heart.

Thanks for the read.