Hey Grieves, Aley here.
To start out I'd like to say that I don't quite understand capitalizing His, but it is an interesting syntactical choice that seems to juxtapose this man to the "lord and savior" Him that usually shows up. This is probably the most interesting thing in the poem in my opinion, and deserves further investigation.
Here we have a man who is, more or less, impotent, with mistresses and a wife, but he's struggling with impotency which usually is not what a man with mistresses deals with. What's also interesting is how they scold him for it. It seems to be a closer look at the affects of impotency on humans, probably older considering he has a wife already, but he could still be young.
I'm not 100% sure what the blue pill/red pill imagery is about. I'm assuming one is passion [possibly a viagra type thing] and the other is relaxation and old age. The blue pill also harkens to birth control, which I thought was an interesting touch. I thought Viagra was purple though.
Anyway, moving on. I think this poem is very disjointed. I don't really like how you have the capitals at the beginning of every line, or the lack of stop-punctuation like question marks and periods. With all of the capitalized "His" it makes it hard to read because we aren't sure if "He'll abandon" is supposed to be on it's own or not, or if we just are supposed to follow some of the capitalization. I'd suggest adding in periods and sentences again just to go back to recognizable sentences with the oddity in the capitalization. The good thing is that you're consistent with the capitalization of "Him" so we can discount that if we try to take a closer look. Overall the capitalization doesn't do much for me. Scarcity makes the world sweeter they say, and having so much capitalized takes that away.
Another reason this feels really disjointed is because the storyline is hard to follow. We aren't really getting clear images for this character, but a smattering of images that go through the story. We start out with a facade, which isn't really something we can see. You seem to throw in big words just for the sake of it, I mean if we translate "somatic replaces the sabbatic[not a word to google]" we get "The body replaces the vacation" which really doesn't make much sense. I understand that you're going for the body wakes back up again, but a sabbatical is a leave, so either we're stuck with not knowing what was left, [potency maybe?] and questioning how that could possibly be replaced. I'd have to say something like "drugs rejuvenate the fire" instead because it's in plainer English.
Overall, I'd take another whack at this poem and try simplifying the language and adding in sentence structure again. The division between vocabulary and grammar conventions makes this poem like a guy wearing a business suit at a beach. Changing one of those will improve the juxtaposition between the grammar and the words.
Points: 1883
Reviews: 806
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