You're burning the cigarette down to the butt this week,
allowing cinders to fall on our shoes.
flicking three weeks of sparks from your therapy session
at my shaking silhouette - you've burned too many shadows
in twenty-one days.
I ask you to
unclench your fists.
We scrape ankles, we break our wrists,
love starting with lightning on the pinnacle of youth and
disintegrating down to chapped desperation.
Our dappled red passion (always boxed in cardboard
and cryptic calligraphy) has burned down to
brown coals, and you're only
the aftertaste of smoke.
Release.
Between our hands, your
ashes grind.
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
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125,018 Literary Works • 672,857 Reviews
I suppose cables might bring up the image of machinery, something stripped down to its barest naked parts. Still, that whole stanza is just full of cluttered metaphors, so I say ditch it.
Don't worry, it does have a meaning! It meant something to me, anyway. Putting a random machinery metaphor does not constitute meaning. This poem as a whole had meaning.
The title is a nickname? I don't even want to know...
EDIT: It sounds like a really crappy, grungy garage band.
Colleen
Sorry, I shouldn't have let nicknames spin off into my poetic work. I'll edit the title.
And I'm unsure as to why I added cables, honestly. I struggled over that. It sounded right, I almost horribly wanted it to have a meaning.
Thanks for reading and responding.
The title made me want to vomit. Word play is in no way justified here.
I did like that the title tied in with the poem in terms of nicotine in cigarettes.
I liked that this wasn't quite as cryptic as some of your other stuff; what it was about was clear, for the most part. Here are some places that were questionable:
Three weeks? Has the subject been smoking that cigarette for three weeks? Clear this up or take it out.
The "soul" part sounds kind of like an attempt to be poetic that fails because the term is overused.
The body's boots? I know the term shaking in one's boots, and the soul is shaking in its boots, but that's really, really taking it too far. Just...no.
Too many adjectives, too twisted. Saying things with a bunch of different words in a really long way does not constitute enjoyable poetry. It constitutes poetry that takes a few reads to just decipher what the sentence means. There are much simpler ways to say, "We started out crazy in love and now it's just not so wild anymore." What do cables have to do with it?The only good thing was the reference back to burning and smoke.
And in the first line, methinks you mean "our" wrists. I also believe it's "disintegrating" with an e after the first t, not an i.
Usually I hear the verb "to whisk" being used when something is being "whisked away" by an outer force. This seems to suggest that the ashes are flying away of their own accord. This does not seem to be correct.
Good stuff!
Colleen