Let dead things lie, lest you bring them back to life.

I'd never quite understood the way memories taste, feel,
smell-- simply watched the way
things look from ten, twenty years on,
but memories go gray by then, brittle,
stale as the cellar I breathe in everytime I walk by,
wondering if that's the smell of death,
if that's why my lungs crave it.

I eat crumbs of silence in the cemetery of words and
drop them on the ground, so that I can find my way out.
My hands are black with the soil, the night,
the quiet, and I lift my poem out of the earth like a body,
hush it as it breathes once again,
pray to God that I did not have to do this.

It crumples into my hands, and gasps.

Wow, you write really good!! This poem just makes me feel what you must have felt while you were writing it!! Great imagery, by the way!!!! Keep writing!!!

Oh wow! I have a really great picture in my head. Amazing imagery and voice. Keep it up! I like the last line the best. Are you going to write more of these kinds of poems? If so, I'll have to look in to them.

That's a rather moribund depiction of art, and an interesting one. I have often thought of artistic creation as a sort of Gnostic thing--the radical introduction of a thing half-you, half the world, let out with no kill switch, no real way of knowing where it's going. I understand some practice more craft than I do, but I think we're always letting loose a little piece of ourselves when we create. That said, this poem strikes me as something along those lines, though more Taoist in its underlying philosophy than Gnostic. Taoist, I say, because the notion that the poem is a pre-existing, hidden, even buried thing, brings to mind the cycle--not the line--of history. A cycle of things created and re-created, cycled and re-recycled, nothing new, everything simultaneously original and resurrected out of the whole great mass of literary and emotional tradition. The free verse of this work serves the point well--it is not perfumed--it is bare and blunt as an open grave. I do not regret having taken a peek inside.

Hey, it's me again. This poem was really lovely. I'm only really sorry that I can't offer any advice on how to improve it. It was in my opinion well done. It didn't rhyme. And that's a bonus, getting me to like poetry that doesn't rhyme is a tough one but you passed with flying colours. Your poem makes me think of memories that we wish to keep dead. Your title:

Let dead things lie, lest you bring them back to life

In itself makes me think of that. Like keeping old experiences dead in your memories lest you think upon them and revive them. I have no idea if that's what you intended but that's the great thing about art isn't it? Two people can look at a picture and get a completely different meaning out of it. It may not be what the artist intended but at least it inspired them to think about it, especially from two different points of view

Another curious step. Your movements are spinning away from you.

Persy wrote:I'd never quite understood the way memories taste, feel,

THINK ABOUT WHAT THIS MEANS, especially with the coming initial word of your next line.
Precision. Poignancy, explicit, clarity; this is what they mean in finding a needle in a haystack; that sort of sincerity, intended or not. When you write "I'd never quite" we have a double entendre in poetic metaphors and craft: what is the spine of your speaker made of here? Because contractions are informal, though much more common, us greeting us to a cuisine of porridge, tapioca, and dried up orange peels: "understood the way memories taste, feel,". What is engaging here in this first line?

Perhaps your speaker appreciates this introspection, because that's what it is, though I'm glad you started out here than what you had before, for reasons I already told you. You've got to have an opening that does not inhibit your duty to make the experience, not an opening that is self-conscious!

smell-- simply watched the way
things look from ten, twenty years on,
but memories go gray by then, brittle,
stale as the cellar I breathe in everytime I walk by,
wondering if that's the smell of death,
if that's why my lungs crave it.

AHA, you leave off smell for the beginning of this line to create, a pause, and alliteration. You're not using your eyes and your intuition here, this is what I meant by your movements running away from you. It's not the narrative in poetry you need to focus on first and foremost. It's the depiction of a world in words; you write smell and then sterile words to describe change in years. Even with sight that would have been a fairly weak association, until the third line down; and then do you notice how you hang images here on words like "cellar"? You leave these chances to develop sensory association in "memories go gray", "brittle", "stale", "breathe", and...then you drop into that little cliche as if resigning yourself: "smell of death" & "lungs crave it".

This isn't telling me. It's haphazardly jerking around. A certain writer on here completely disassociates their reader to the maximum, going so far as to see them as unnecessary and just an appendage; they drown them because it is fun. I see you struggle constantly between balance and elegance, beauty and self-disgust; you are not a distance writer, you do not fracture a reader's empathy. With everything you write, they associate and attempt to see more, even if what they attempt to see is fractured itself.

I eat crumbs of silence in the cemetery of words and
drop them on the ground, so that I can find my way out.
My hands are black with the soil, the night,
the quiet, and I lift my poem out of the earth like a body,
hush it as it breathes once again,
pray to God that I did not have to do this.

The first line is good, it is simple. What's wrong with it? It's popped up in a poem that's struggling to engage me, so it comes off as slightly uptight and too serious, even you "drop them on the ground" to find a way out; what in the hell? Communication in images and movement; you've always struggled with movement, whereas I have wanted to push and tear and rip movement to its very ends to see what I can do, and in the process I've come to see you need to be reminded of physical activities, sports, etc, that you once loved.

THAT MOVEMENT, that pause, the steel gaze, that sweat trickling on your nape, glistening in the high noon sun, your hand caked in a brown sugar, you squint your eyes that are shot with blood and little flashing streaks you, the sugar is dirt, you feel this second pass by in the red raw skin your shorts are making at your waist from tying it too tightly you feel the callous on your hands pulled like play do and grated like mozzarella you see your knees in shades of magenta mauve spring green and periwinkle; adrenaline adrenaline adrenaline you whisper in your head, like rising from an ice bath, nude and goosebumped, skin tense like a snake ready to strike your mind tells you to kick the ball into the net.

The end of this poem I can't say too much for honestly.

It crumples into my hands, and gasps.

You're taking the safe way out in this ending. Show me your resolve once again Perse.

Spoiler

I tried and no one walked by. =_=