Ashes, Ashes

by xanthan gum

Published August 24, 2006

This is how you feel the flow of fire,
as it pulls you taut and graceful in stadium lights.
Blare down at the brass instruments, bellowing the
final tidal note over grass and green as laurel leaves.
Catching sharpened metal in your wrists,
painless and slick, the world is drenched in
Red and black team spirit –
Death and passion is how we paint our face.
keep us on our feet, the push and the win.
Skin and candy across a thousand feet while the
wind whistles the melody to a finite,
climatic “amen”. Metal tip to sky,

We all fall down.
There is no heartbeat, the crowd is sinking.
Funeral murmurs breathe into the smoke, for in all this cacophony
who could hear the sound of gunshot clapping?

Comments & reviews · 3
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xanthan gum
Comment
xanthan gum commented Comment · Aug 30, 2006

Thank you so much, BGB. I miss critiques =[

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backgroundbob
Review
backgroundbob wrote a review Review · Aug 30, 2006

Your poems seem to have a nasty thing for going uncommented upon, probably because there's so many of them and they're all very difficult to critique. Two good things, really, but you wouldn't know it from the lack of interest!

Anywho:

This is how you feel the flow of fire,
Alliteration used effectively! Score one point.
as it pulls you taut and graceful in stadium lights.
Nice image, but ineffectively structured: IMHO, "as it pulls you, taut and graceful in the stadium lights" not only fits the rhythm better, but leaves the reader with a much clearer picture.
Blare down at the brass instruments, bellowing the
final tidal note over grass and green as laurel leaves.
Nice again: "grass AS green", I think you meant, though.
Catching sharpened metal in your wrists,
Watch your cliches, m'dear: it flows well, but stock lines about slitting your wrists will turn many people off your poem at once, regardless of how much hidden meaning you want them to grasp in it.
painless and slick, the world is drenched in
Red and black team spirit -
Death and passion is how we paint our face.
Much better; the team spirit comment redeems that whole section, for me.
keep us on our feet, the push and the win.
This line is a fragment, not really a whole line at all: it doesn't really fit at all, but as you seem to be going for a jagged, choppy kind of poem, that might be all to the good.
Skin and candy across a thousand feet while the
wind whistles the melody to a finite,
climatic "amen". Metal tip to sky,
Again, 'skin' and 'candy' don't seem to fit together well; the way the sentence is structured makes it feel like one is a verb and one a noun, which grate on one another. Still, maybe you're looking to grate :)
I'm not sure why you've split the lines where you have, either - something like sticking "while the" to the next one might be better.
Just one other thing: it's only stylistic preference, but I always think italics works better than quotation marks for those highlighted spots like "amen". Just a thought.

We all fall down.
There is no heartbeat, the crowd is sinking.
Funeral murmurs breathe into the smoke, for in all this cacophony
who could hear the sound of gunshot clapping?
Lovely ending - you have the most amazing grasp of imagery it's unreal. I think you need an "s" on the end of "gunshot", but that's beside the point - this is beautiful.

An excellent piece, yet again. Here's to more comments in future :)



A memorandum isn't written to inform the receiver, but to protect the writer.
— Dean Acheson