sincerity

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i am disgusted
with myself

when the fern curls
and i cannot catch the flowers;
am i a faggot,
if i dress my salad
with a pinky up
and lather the waitress down
with milky eyes,
judging
how bad her fashion is
between crouton and baguette?

i would chuck Freud eggs,
but they are better left
to the chickens




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Hey, shiney1 here.

I will review this in all of my honesty.
This poem is... interesting. It makes sense to a certain extent, but it has to be read quite a few times for it to come together as a whole in one's head.
It flows fairly well, like 5/10, and it is a bit too choppy and all over the place.
Maybe you are just writing what popped into your head or soul. That sounds like what happened, because those places are complex and sometimes hard to convey and understand, like this piece. But since you want feedback on a work, it is best to make it more easily understandable.
The capitalization is nil, which is a big no-no, no matter how you look at it, and it is hard for people to take a piece seriously if it is plagued with simple errors such as these.


I am disgusted
with myself.

When the fern curls
and I cannot catch the flowers;
am I a faggot,
if I dress my salad
with a pinky up
and lather the waitress down
with milky eyes,
judging
how bad her fashion is
between crouton and baguette?

I would chuck Freud eggs,
but they are better left
to the chickens



In the end, I think something like a spoiler would be appropriate here. So the reader at least gets a little clue about the meaning or theme of a poem like this.
Those are my little tidbits.
"If you ever have a problem don't say 'Hey God I have a big problem.' Rather 'Hey Problem... I have a big God and it's all going to be okay."




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Hey :) I agree its, interesting.... But i don't mean that in a way where someone doesn't like something and instead of being honest they say its interesting. Quite the contrary its quirky, original. I love the line about the ferns, i just think thats beautiful so well done. Yes the rest of the poem is quite alternate and to me (who's more interesting in the romantic period styles poetry) its a little inaccessible but i still like it! I don't know if it was your intention but i found the whole thing comically pretentious- in a good way, as in it made me giggle a bit but i'm really really sorry if it wasn't meant to be like that :S. So its really short. <<<so there's not much i can say about it. But in my opinion the ending's a little uneventful. An ending to a poem should be dramatic, it should tie in the whole meaning of the poem and come to a conclusion. But then again i realise this poem is different and i completely understand if this was a conscious decision to leave the ending completely inconclusive and ambiguous. But overall well done! Its original and concise.
"You grow, you grow like tornado
You grow from the inside
Destroy everything through
Destroy from the inside
Erupt like volcano
You flow from the inside
You kill everything through
You kill from the inside"




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Yo, yo, yo, MMM. :mrgreen:

So, I guess I agree with shiney1 partly, but not entirely. I think that I had to read this another time over before I could find myself grabbing the gist of what point you were trying to convey. But I have to be honest in admitting I don't always get this sort of abstract poetry my first time around reading it. It takes me some time, but maybe I'm just slow. xD Because I still find it fascinating coming across poetry like this that I don't really "get" the first time I read it. I actually am left thinking. Everything isn't obvious like most would hope. Maybe that's why a lot of people don't really quite get poetry like this. It eats at their brain a little. Which is why I would rate this a thumbs up.

I disagree about the capitalization thing Shiney mentioned. I think it's definitely a stylistic choice. And here it just happens to work for this poem. I use to think poetry had to be all neatly puntualized with proper capitalization and all that, but then I got more exposed and I quite like this lower case style choice.

I think your ending is what truly summed this all up for me. Well that and the beginning.

MeanMrMustard wrote:i would chuck Freud eggs,
but they are better left
to the chickens


It seemed as though you were hinting at the speakers decision to avoid confronting the inner conflict that seemed to be described here. At least, that's the impression I got as a reader. Like I said, I'm not the best at deciphering this type of stuff much of the time, but I love how it makes me think. :mrgreen:

Great job on this, MMM. Look forward to reading more interesting poetry from you in the future.

-Smylin'
Paul is my little, evil, yellow bundle of joy.




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An interesting little bit. It held my interest throughout, which is pretty rare, although it didn't give me a whole lot to remember it for either. It feels like a musing, which is not bad in and of itself, but I think there's more you could do with it. I'm torn on your reference to the French restaurant. Given that this poem is not French, that suggests fine dining to me, which didn't work for me initially. This is a poem centered around ostracization so I want contrast between the speaker and his world. For that reason, a cheaper, more conservative restaurant initially seemed more powerful to me.
Then I realized that the French restaurant might fit better with your ending, saying that psychoanalysis and intellectualism are things best left to psychoanalysts and intellectuals, things that are more self-indulgent than genuinely meaningful. This suggests that maybe the speaker is struggling less against conservative viewpoints who don't bother trying to understand him and more against those who try so hard to understand him that their theories become how they identify him.
Your last three lines are quite a jump, and I'm left wanting some kind of transition. It's like you knew where you wanted to start and where you wanted to end but couldn't think of a middle, so you just put the starting point and ending point right next to each other. I'd like more insight into the speaker's mind. A little more to grab onto.
This is really quite nice. These little tweaks are my way of saying that all this niceness you have isn't quite enough to make it really resonate. Give it a little more kick so that I'll still remember it two weeks from now.




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With Nightshade on the French restaurant, however the importance of what kind of restaurant it is I feel is negligible.

It is interesting. It has a Bukowski grittiness to it, in addition to prettiness--see, this is what I was referring to earlier--which is not to say you are as limited as he. Also; vaguely reminiscent of another writer's work for which I would gladly provide links if you're interested.

This poem is what it is--cute and clever as a whole. It won't stay with me for weeks, however, I don't feel it needs to. It has necessary impact on the reader.



I want to always be known as the one who started the perry epidemic
— Quillfeather