Poetry Forum

Mingle with the night
give the moon your eyes and bones
sleep inside the stars.

Hi PPE, enjoyed the read, though I'm not going to pretend I understand it. So, with that in mind disdained into alienation disclaimed in laborious solitude ........ why is solitude modified when alienation isn't? Seems awkward. restrained by horse-hide whips of the multitudes, beatific hermaphrodit...

A powerful poem. "Like the centrepiece of a family feast, a gutted fish, a rabbit skinned." these lines seemed a bit much, a bit over the top Is there a reason you didn't close his eyes before? Fascination with his stare? Perhaps that should be the end of the poem, the reason you left his ...

Ray,

Thanks for giving it a read. It is obscure to me also, so it's not necessarily a failure on your part. But I didn't set out to make it obscure. that's how it came out. As I said above, I'm still trying to makes heads or tails out of it.

PPE

I got a dehumanising feel in the abstractions, a cold world of science and ccmputerisation. Mac, This poem came suddenly and almost felt like it was being dictated to me. I've been reading Watt by Samuel Beckett and then watched a film called Instant Dreams, about the quixotic efforts of disparate ...

Revision 9/1 Disdained into pantheistic alienation disclaimed in laborious solitude restrained by horse-hide whips of the multitudes, beatific hermaphrodites struggle through the streams of a digital dark age past the edges of empathy lifted out of sin by sequential angels painted with ashes, prayed...

Our shaman's story
analog not digital
undissected dreams.

This is an interesting mix of the eternal and the present tense (e.g. the Covid precautions). My two gripes: I don't think of the sea as "droning". Somehow that seems insulting to that lovely sound, even if it does become monotonous after a while. Second is that 'nappy full of faeces"...

Thanks Mac, Not & Ray, Good suggestions and relevant criticisms. I will return to it. I'm writing several of these about long ago loves, though this is the only one that has a contemporary piece attached to it. And that one ("1977") is problematic for me in terms of revision. It's an a...

Not, Thanks for the read/critique. Sorry to hear they don't work together (or individually). 1977 is 40 years old. I did edit it a bit, but wanted to retain as much as the original as I could. "wind woodenchimed" is a Joycean construction (well, he would have written "woodenchimed win...

1. 1977 The wind wooden chimed, webs of shadow wound round the light in this room. The haunting hollowness of her sad bright apparition carried on south by the breeze. Out of night I touch this end: the barking of dogs between the gusts of the dark outside, lost night clouds and the curved earthen l...

Ray, I really like the rythym and rhyme and especially the narrative. Great title also, the poem that followed was a complete surprise. Two suggestions: I don't think it "strange" that you made the connection. I don't exactly get the meaning of the last line, especially phrase "aping ...

I suppose the sentiments hold good for the internet as well as TV, so you might want to reconsider the title. But anyway, I enjoyed the poem. with eyes infused with delight. - the repetition of "with" doesn't read well. Me? I’m just one big pump keeping up the flow of blood and lymph - I ...

Or Americans
who say, "This is not Nam,
it's just not." It is.

Hi pom, a bit confused (as you'd expect) is 'A child' the same as 'the gargoyle child' or 'the antebellum child' or even 'The child'? Or are they all brothers? And if so, what distinguished 'a child' from 'the child'? re. 'black', personally I think 'issues' needs more attention. I think starting w...

Thanks for reading Mac,

It occurs to me the "fiery rain" should maybe not be "black". I'll have to ponder that.

A child’s fall out of limbo and skin gives orient flesh its groaning wings and pivots a tongue for grief. The gargoyle child shuns the spoken waves spurning all promise of shape and sleep. The dead watch this antebellum child whose muscle and bone and unloving art quells the numberless city as he jo...

Squirrels have more lives than a cat. I choose to believe he was just surprised and made it across the street. Otherwise when I opened my eyes, I would have seen just another roadkill. The feeling of helplessness was quite overpowering. And so I closed my eyes, even as I waited for the inevitable. W...

Thanks for reading Mac. These are imitations of Felix Feneon's "Novels in Three Lines" that I just finished reading. I found it interesting to try to compact certain real and imaginary experiences into the shortest space possible. Not a new idea, but new to me. One reason I miss newspapers...

1. A squirrel, attempting to cross a busy street, encountered a rotating car tire with his head, and flipped twice. When the observer opened his eyes again, the squirrel had vanished. 2. At dusk, a toad crossed the stonework sidewalk from a patio and crawled over a log into the monkey grass. The toa...

I'm just finishing Felix Feneon's Novels in Three Lines . Feneon is a fascinating person. These are are a series of short news blurbs, pretty much the only thing that survives him, written for a newspaper in 1906 France. Wonderful introduction by Luc Sante. Example of one: On the bowling lawn a stro...

Thanks Caleb. Thanks to Not also, he helped me make it clearer. It is scary how much TV (really for me, it's movies) are my reality. I realized this long ago when trying to intelligently converse with other people. They had actual experiences to talk about. Everything I could add to the conversation...

Regarding being fat, we all know there is a lot of prejudice against heavy people. However, I once read a story about Chechen rebels who took over a school in Russia (I think it was a school), and the first thing they did was they rounded up the chubby teachers and killed them all. In their minds, ...

Thanks again Not.......made some of your suggested changes, but I'm satisfied to end it there (did change "unimagined").

He ney true Scotsman
but cause he had done all
he couldnay settle.*

stolen from James Kelman