some people might be fond of building cages out of bones
and giving them glossy enamel finishes, while others prefer
variation; blood cells, maybe, clustered up on top of one another,
rowing down veins where the plasma's all dried up
and the skin on the bank is knotted grass--dead and dying.
it's a macabre trip, but one that most people
aren't likely to forget.
it isn't possible to not remember, either way,
when you're in a kaleidoscopic whirl
of comets hurtling against one another, black and ghastly amidst the gore.
somehow, they will find a way to pierce through the collisions
until the scarlet flows like melted iron
right through our fingers.
I like to think of it as a kind of bio-accumulation, dismal
and dreary when it hits the sails and poisonous
when it pervades me.
I am drunk on decay, and it soothes me.
sometimes, though, I like to walk along the earth's membrane,
semi-permeable and mortal, like everything that is and will be.
it bothers me how fissures appear in its surface, fissures that I
will always try to seal with dead skin cells and twining fibre from the crust.
some holes are meant to simply appear again, scowls against sediments.
and though the wind wallops the wiry clouds through the sky, and the world respires
rhythmically, I reassure myself with the knowledge that comets exist.
it's a kaleidoscopic world and nothing is set in stone.
(but Everything is.)
~
some people might be fond of making highways from windpipes,
and picking at stars to use as headlights for their carbon-based cars,
while others prefer sampans made from the toxic waste
that lines the rivers when the world can't sleep.
I dwell in this decay; this decay is me.
but there are nights where I pick at the ends of the clouds,
holding their coverlets up and peeping at the wild blue
and tapping against the stars to see if they'll come loose.
sometimes they wail like sirens, haunting, brooding melodies
that enrapture me.
a comet will fall down on us someday, a singeing black mark
against kaleidoscopic whirls.
and I know that I will swallow it when it comes,
its fiery tail an explosion in my vena cava: sheer heartburn.
but biting down on comets isn't very crude;
not when we live on decay.
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125,020 Literary Works • 672,734 Reviews
Hello!
You really do have a knack for word choice. All of your words are delicious 10 point words packed with imagery and connotation. Sadly, there's so much of that that I don't really know what's going on.
I think I'm one of those poor unfortunate people who thinks there must be a point to poetry, like a theme or a message. I really do like those poems. And while there may be a message here, (it is definitely revolving around a similar topic the whole time) it reads like a poem that is written just to sound pretty. Which you may have written it for. I dunno. I guess it's okay to write poems for that reason, but I don't like them as much.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed this poem very much. The words complimented each other like nothing I've ever heard. Also, with your sub-theme of kaleidoscope whirls, this kind of confusion fits. So I'm not sure if you should actually change anything. I'm torn.
So your main theme seems to be decay, and then your other theme seems to be kaleidoscope whirls. These things seem very opposite to me, and I'm not sure I ever found the bridge in your poem except for the language you use (which is very kaleidoscopic while describing the decay).
I can find so many meanings when I really read into this poem, that I'm just not sure what your main idea was, other than it had to do with your body as the earth/underworld.
I keep wanting to say "simplify this!" but that would detract from my favorite part of this.
Everything else was flawless, I think.
Sorry for the wishy-washy review. Your poems are just so nice and lovely to read.
Keep writing!
~fortis
Hi PomPom~
First off I'd like to say that this poem really got me thinking about what it was saying. Which was good. I liked that. You didn't hold back on vocabulary for the reader and in a way that really helps with the kaleidoscope theme. It also makes the poem slower to read, which can also be good.
That being said, overall, it was a good poem. There are, as always, things I can find wrong with it to tell you about though. I think the biggest thing for this poem is that while it develops into this theme of body vs earth, it really didn't start there. This is a case where the front of the essay didn't know what the end of the essay was going to say. I think in this case, it's important to start where you end, maybe once removed, but not twice.
The first removal would be relating the first things, this:
The second removal is that we're talking about the different things cages can be made of. This layer of complication isn't necessary. We already have quite a few complications including but not limited to thinking about geography as our skin, the description of kaleidoscope worlds, and thinking about [geography as our skin] in relation to [kaleidoscope worlds]. All of these are points where we have to blindly follow you along, so putting, on top of that, a relationship to how this makes cages is just too complicated. As complex looking as a kaleidoscope is, it is pretty because the shapes are reduced to just something simple, a smear of colors. Meanwhile we're comparing that to this complex thing of geography.
Personally I think the strong suit of this poem is the language use. You could use a better balance between kaleidoscopes and the world, or maybe hinting a little closer to the surface about the land being the body, but I don't think it really needs it, it's just a suggestion to look at if someone else says something about it. It's a poem you have to study, which is nice.