this is good. I like this.
i wish i was softer -
smooth blades of clean summer sunshine along the backs
of my arms,
along the tips of my fingers, all yellow and orange
and white,
sharp bursts of warmth where the winter has clung deep,
crackling bones and bleaching skin opal white.
“how can you expect him to love you when you don’t
love yourself”
but what is there to love on beaches after the
hurricane has swept gunk onto the shore.
i am coated in broken shells and tin cans and plastic
rings that hold my quake,
hold my body down where the cold bleaches and bleaches
and bleaches
not the summer sun cutting warm trails along my beaches,
long cold stretches of miles upon miles of coastal
shores made thick with foam
and grime and muck and all the things that have been
stuffed at the bottom of the ocean
by different hands made visible again.
if you ask me where i start and where i end
i’d say the same place; i am a hard thing, a tactile
thing, a thing that ages
and ages and ages and ages and ages.
where i start and where i end does not shift, it
persists.
i wish i was softer -
pliable dough between your hands, made sweeter and
warmer with care
and with summer sunshine on the edge of your window
sill.
but i am not soft.
Seeing you had a poem up made old rusty gears turn.
-cracks knuckles-
Take this with a heaping tablespoon of salt as you know my personal style has greatly shifted from yours.
The middle metaphor with the beaches and the repetition is Just Off for me, where there are internal rhymes and a bookend without enough material between it to really be poignant. You've basically spent seven lines saying the exact same thing twice with the exact same words, and that bulk is (ironically) weighing this down. In a sense that irony has a certain amount of poetic justice to it, but—
There's a steady disconnect between your first true stanza (which has a rhyme/repetition of "white" in there, fyi) which has no actual solid metaphor, not really even introducing the metaphor, and not having enough notes to tie the words together. I end up not knowing what it means, then not getting any further clues, and the end brings in a new metaphor.
I actually don't mind the dough metaphor because it is so wishful, and the poem does do a good job of establishing that wishfulness. So the desire there is one of the stronger notes you've got.
But it all comes down to describing yourself, eh? I don't think you managed it as well as you could have, and the jumble of it all, while certainly very rich, is a bit like cotton candy— it dissolves the minute you poke at it too much.
Like I said. Heaping tablespoon of salt. This didn't do it for me, although there's definitely something very shiny under the haphazardness. I wouldn't polish it too much as a poem too neat is a dead poem, but for me it's the repetition that creates a windblown, irregular structure. If you had all of those little hidden rhymes either more or less, it would help.
~Rosey
Thanks for sharing this poem that is brimming with imagery. After all, imagery is one characteristic that separates prose from mere poetry.
The poem starts in the first person singular ”I” but shifts to the second person singular “you” at the sixth line. This caused me to wonder whether the speaker is addressing himself or herself as “you”, addressing a general “you”, or another specific person as “you”.
The speaker is said to be un-lovable. Is compared to a beach with hurricane-deposited gunk, foam, grime, muck, coated in broken shells, tin cans and plastic rings things once hidden at ocean bottom. compares self with something without beginning nor end visible.
A confusing tumult of experiences.
All of this made me search for meaning. Obviously the speaker is saying that she should be considered undesirable by the one being spoken to. Whether this effort to dissuade is being undertaken because the speaker doesn;’t want the person’s attention, or because she wants to soften her own rejection of the person to avoid hurting feelings isn’t revealed. perhaps the person truly feels that the one being spoken to deserves better. Feels that to accept his advances would be to take advantage of his stupidity, infatuation, inexperience-etcetera.
It could involve an experienced woman of the world revealing her true nature to a love-struck youngster. That is left for the reader to ponder since no hint is provided in the beach debris left by the hurricane of her tumultuous life. Of course if hints were provided via the flotsam, we might conclude that the woman is a prostitute of extremely ill repute. but none of the imagery hints at this. So the imagery being non-specific forces the reader to remain in a state of pondering all these possibilities.
Suggestions:
“how can you expect him to love you when you don’t love yourself”[?]
but what is there to love on beaches after the hurricane has swept gunk onto the shore.[?]
a tactile thing, [Tactile means touchable or detectable via touch. Tactile does not preclude softness. Cotton, silk, are is tactile and soft.]
i wish i was softer -[Softer means that it is soft already but could be softer. The same applies to sweeter and warmer.]
....and by the summer sunshine...."
http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictio ... basophilia
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