My sun is high noon
and the summer wishes through the trees.
My bones are steel and muscles crank
well oiled and well set.
My teeth churn on poems and numbers
and language is my nighttime feast.
How can it be?
I am not lethargic, no pain, no queases.
I have been resting like a child,
softly up at 3 AM and the dead until noon.
"It is never going away.
It is an infection of oil,
and has always been.
You know no better,
know no health.
We must take the sun
and box it up, set it on a mantle
take your teeth and file them down to nubs.
The oil needs to leak before
it clogs your shafts and cracks your
gears in two."
They cut for oil
and cut
and drill
and bomb
veins scream
fire on my limbs
i am mutated, a valve grows from my oil tank
and they wooze me once a week
checking only to see how safe i am
for the hungry mouths of their blood pan
the sun is gone
my bones are calcium
i sway with the moontide
and burn too fast to breathe
i am sick
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Canary word: Present
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125,025 Literary Works • 672,762 Reviews
I really loved this poem! I thought your uses of symbolism were exquisite! I myself have an illness that requires lots of annoying maintenance so I completely understand where you are writing from. I'm not great myself with punctuating my poetry, so I have no comments for that
Overall, beautiful poem!
Thank you so much megan17 for your appreciation! I'm really glad to hear I'm not alone out there with this type of feeling too. That's really touching.
No problem! The feeling is mutual.
Heyo Aley!
I really enjoyed reading this poem. I think it's one of my favorites of yours that I've read. The metaphor of a machine that's having the oil taken out of it, for a person having their blood continually drawn is really interesting. And I love that though the poem focuses on this sort of negative mechanical imagery, it is book-ended by the image of nature and the sun. Sometimes poems with drawn out metaphors feel random or sort of patched together, because it's hard to connect the metaphor to whatever the underlying plot is or what the narrator is saying, but that is not a problem with this poem - even if the audience doesn't understand the metaphor there's a strong narrative line to follow of this machine/person facing mechanical distress until they feel that the "sun" is gone and their oil leaked out entirely and they finally admit/realize they are sick.
One issue I had while reading the poem was I had a difficult time interpreting what the sun was supposed to symbolize - hope, heart, health - maybe all three? I'm not sure that this is necessarily a problem since you sort of leave it open to interpretation, but I just wanted to mention I wasn't 100% clear on what that was supposed to be referring to.
I had a few (sort of picky) wording suggestions [and I'm sorry here that I am stretching for critiques because honestly this poem was really tight, and there's not much I would personally think needs changing]. In stanza one - I wonder if in this list
"My teeth churn on poems and math
and language is my nighttime feast."
you could change "math" to "numbers" -- the reason being that "numbers" is a bit more evocative/romantic language than just "math" and also because I don't really see the link to "math" anywhere in this poem - you mention times (high noon, 3am, noon) and some numbers (two, no) but not really any specific mathematics. So it ends up seeming a bit random, whereas I could see the reference to numbers tying in. Another option would even be to change it to a specific mathematical principle (like division, subtraction) which would give us more clues on it's significance. "Poetry" and "language" both seem to fit in the list and are interesting details of the humanity of the this person that is treated as or sees themselves as a machine.
My other nit-picky wording suggestion is a wonder if at some point you could make the metaphor a bit more obvious - like start mixing up the machine and human metaphor - maybe by switching one of times you say "oil" as "blood" or using other medical jargon, the only reason being, that I think the way the poem is written the medical metaphor/interpretation isn't automatically obvious, even with the 'i am sick' line at the end. If you put even one or two bits of medical jargon in, I think it would clue in less careful readers more easily. But that also depends on how you want the poem to be interpreted I suppose.
My last suggestion, is I think you could use a little more alliteration and assonance in here - in some of your other poems that I've read, there's been a strong presence of that, and it was a bit more subtle in this one "wooze me once a week" and some of the repeated "s" sound in stanza 1 being the only ones I caught.
Besides that, I think your formatting/capitalization choices were perfect for the tone and progression of the piece - especially the downward cascade of "They cut for oil / and cut / and drill"
Really well-done Aley! Please let me know if you have any questions about my review or aspects I didn't cover.
~alliyah
I really love your suggestions on how to change math to numbers or something like the pythagorean theorem. I used math because I'm a math tutor and it's something I enjoy playing with XD I wanted to show the dichotomy of my nature with math and english as my two favorites. Changing it to numbers will give me the chance to include math, but not be so blunt with it. I like that. I also know a perfect place to change oil to blood if I used oil there.
In all truth with your last suggestion I think I'm going to leave the alliteration how it is because this poem is about me not feeling like myself, and it sounds like you've picked up on something that's part of my voice. If my voice isn't there, which apparently it isn't, it's because I'm not feeling that well still.
I'm glad that the interpretation is there because you're pretty spot on with how you interpreted this. Thanks so much for the review. I'm going to edit in the changes!
You're welcome! Glad it was helpful.
I like where you replaced oil for blood in "blood pan" - perfect place.
Thanks for sharing this very enigmatic poem. Its images are captivating and reading it is really a pleasure. One thing that I noticed is that it shifts from first person singular viewpoint to first person plural viewpoint. Then it shifts to third person POV. Of course as a reader I wonder who all these persons being spoken about are. The first seem like a student, the second like an oil drilling machine and the third I have no clue. I know that insomnia is spoken about in the initial part. So I really was unable to reconcile all these images into one coherent picture. But as I said, that didn't prevent me from enjoying the poem and I do consider it a work of art.
I won't go into punctuation because I assume that is your stylistic choice for this poem.
Interesting. The poem is written from the point of view of someone who is being told by a doctor that they're sick. So really what you're seeing is first it's the internal thought of the person receiving the news [from the title]. That's the first three stanzas. Then when we get the "Quotes" we hit the doctor speaking to the patient directly explaining what's going to happen and why it needs to happen. Those are the fourth and fifth stanzas. The rest of the poem after that stanzas 6-10 are the treatment of the person so "they" are the nurses who are treating the speaker, the patient. The end of the poem is back to internal thought from the speaker.
Oh, and yes. I purposely broke my punctuation down into nothing including a lack of capitals. I did it for a symbolic reason. <3 Thanks so much for the comments!