twelve

by Liz

Published April 1, 2005

there is faded blue writing on my hand:
my timetable written in blueberry biro.
scripturemathsfrenchgeography it's like a
neverending stream of wordsinkpaper.

hey but it's no better sitting in cars and
eating pears and listening to pete murray,
although i have to admit it's so poetic when there's
twelve more days to be scratched out on the calender.

like she said, the day we never thought would come
has come around so fast.
i hate to think of all that time trickled down the drain
that i will never regain, but i can't do a thing about it.

i'm just a girl who wears purple fluffy grosby slippers
at four o'clock in the afternoon and draws
on her school skirt because she's bored as hell.
time gets the better of me every single moment.

they all look champagnebeautiful and i hate the way
i walk away from it all, just so i don't have to face it.
i can't sit and take reality; it's tooconcrete toogrey toocrushing.
but they're reality and they're tooglittering tooblonde tooglucose.

i don't understand how reality can take such different
forms, such different disguises and still be
reality. i don't think i want to understand it.
each day i try to duck under their purple fairy wings.

and yeah, it works sometimes.
sometimes i can escape such smotheringly shimmering wrath
and just lie back and watch the city sleep.
other times their wings wrap themselves around me and i choke.

this time next month i'll be walking in high heels
and travelling on the metro and eating baguettes
and ihopetogod it feels less like reality
and more like brightly coloured pavements which feel nice under your feet.
written: Saturday 4th September 2004, 8:16pm.

Comments & reviews · 7
User avatar
hi-mi-tsu
Comment
hi-mi-tsu commented Comment · Apr 5, 2005

I liked the piece, but I agree with filmcanister in that there has to be some logic to your strung-together words. Otherwise it looks like they were forced or randomly placed and that's not good.
The idea behind the poem, however, was excellent.

User avatar
filmcanister
Review
filmcanister wrote a review Review · Apr 5, 2005

have you read "god of small things" by arundhati roy? she does the stringingwordstogetherthing. it won the booker prize. very good text if you have not yet picked it up.

i hate to think of all that time trickled down the drain
that i will never regain, but i can't do a thing about it.

regain and drain rhyme. so what? it's generally ugly to have random rhyming words when there a) aren't any others in the piece and b) isnt any real meter to hold them together. reconsider.


i can't sit and take reality; it's tooconcrete toogrey toocrushing.
but they're reality and they're tooglittering tooblonde tooglucose.

in addition, give some thought to the order of your strungtogether words. there needs to be a definate connection and flow and ORDER between the different ideas that they present. they'll be significantly stronger that way.

User avatar
Micah
Comment
Micah commented Comment · Apr 5, 2005

Rather confusing, but yeah, i like the strungtogetherwords!
Keep it going.

User avatar
niteowl
Review
niteowl wrote a review Review · Apr 3, 2005

I liked the strung-together words. It helped a lot with imagery in this case. Normally I wouldn't like some of the line breaks, but in this case they work.

they all look champagnebeautiful and i hate the way
i walk away from it all, just so i don't have to face it.
i can't sit and take reality; it's tooconcrete toogrey toocrushing.
but they're reality and they're tooglittering tooblonde tooglucose.


I really liked this stanza. Keep it up!

PS: I think it's really cool how you write down when you wrote the poem.

User avatar
Emma
Comment
Emma commented Comment · Apr 2, 2005

It confused me too, but I like it!

Random avatar
emotion_less
Comment
emotion_less commented Comment · Apr 2, 2005

I didn't really get the purpose, but the words kind of stood out to me, I guess, even though it confused me.



And then, as if written by the hand of a bad novelist, an incredible thing happened.
— Bartimaeus of Uruk