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Guilt
Too much sugar on a Friday.
too much guilt on a Sunday.
Need me some veggies
and time to clean my dirt road soul
who walks alone. Time to party
with the road kill dead rot sadness
shouting in my head.
I remember the slow pull
of your sticky lip
when I drove away.
No more pills snuck into my cake
All pills out, with frosting on them
All to see and take without me
Around a table they pass them out
And drink a cup of tea with a spoonful
of sugar.
My pink cheeks will lower into a cool bath
with my eyes closed
in a satin Victorian squeezed dress,
mermaid hair, soft water.
Death will come in a breath of wind
A knife lay on the side tub
just in case.
Stack the days on top of what isn’t said
like weights from a workout machine
with blue edged bubbles of evil thoughts:
Die you slut, die you whore, die you cunt.
I’m so grateful time continues
Maybe she will forget.
I’m so grateful
time continues.
Maybe she was drunk.
I’m so grateful time continues.
Maybe she won’t see.
She did see. Someone told me.
4 comments:
I think this has got a lot of good stuff in it. The internal logic of how you're getting from one stanza to another could be articulated in the poem, maybe explaining the relevancy of each part in words. I think that once you do this you could more easily find what should stay & go in the poem. You got a good pile of ideas here. I can tell you listen to your internal voice, your mind's eye. Grow, prioritize, prune, and rearrange?
(I offer this opinion realizing that I could follow my own advice: so much easier to see what others could do rather than one's self.)
My favorite line is "leave the knife on the side [of the?] tub just in case. Or do you mean "tub side"? Not sure what a "side tub" is.
I think the two references to "sugar" fight with each other and I like the first one better.
In the stanza beginning "all the pills out," who are "they"? I thought poet was talking to a "you." And I'd stick to present tense and drop the "wills" which rob the poem of its "just in case" ambiguity.
Finally, I'm having trouble transitioning from the bathtub to a workout machine. Conflicting images. The blue edged bubbles work with the bathtub, but not in relation to a steel machine.
So, I'd lose the entire stanza about the pills unless you are going for the Dorothy Parker effect, save the pink cheeks in the bath, tinker with the "stack the days" stanza to bring it into the bath and end as you do with the stack of short verses.
Just some thoughts over coffee.
I'm not sure that I have a whole lot to say about this one. I love some of the lines.
It does seem to me that a poem that starts with "Need me some veggies' in the first stanza is a different poem from the poem that continues on "Death will come in a breath of wind/A knife lay on the side tub/just in case" in the sixth.
G.M. Palmer said, "Good poetry is meant to be understood, not decoded," and I wonder if there isn't too much to be decoded here. Who is the third-person "she" in the last few stanzas, and what is her relationship to the second-person "you" in the third?
I think there are amazing things in this poem. I agree that there are jarring tonal shifts and you don't know whether it is funny or serious or where you are supposed to end up. I can relate to the first two lines. I think "need me some veggies" could go. Love second stanza and third. Repetition of "all" and "out" doesn't work in the next stanza as well, tighten and clarify syntax, love the sound and what it says. Little more subtlety would help. Evil thoughts is too telling. The next line says it all. Love that. The poem is first person at first (me) then there's an I and a she. I would just leave it in first person: Grateful time continues, maybe I will forget. The last two stanzas need a rework. Not as powerful as the rest.
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