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Thursday, December 27, 2012

Poetry Submission #1

You have all been spared the scaryness of reading any of my desperate attempts at squishing words together to form this poetry stuff! We have a submission! Whee!  Ok...so...now what?

I'm leaving the main "Critique" up to our readers. But I'm going to post my "Impressions". Mainly because this is how I read poetry. This is why I enjoy it. How it leaves me. The lines that stay..."Two Roads diverged in a wood and I -- I took the one less traveled by." (Robert Frost) Has always struck me as very mournful. Lonely. Emily Dickinson is one of my absolute favorite. She has such a way with a turn of phrase. "Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me." Hysterical!

Anyway. This is how I read poetry.  


black as hell

my lover's eyes are black;
black as night
black as crow
black as ice
black as sin
black as patent leather
glistening under the pale moonlight
I like how you're showing us the way life looks back and white sometimes, in moonlight. All color gone. And the different levels of black.

my lover's hair is black;
black as coal
black as jet
black as cat
black as pitch
black as the cold depths
of the deep, dark sea
Again. Beautiful comparisons. But for some reason my mind automatically read that last line as "Dangerous sea"

my lover's skin is black;
black as ink
black as space
black as tar
black as onyx
black as a beetle's carapace
shimmering under a red, hot sun
These comparisons make him seem more dangerous somehow. There seems to be an underlying hum of "something is going to go very very wrong here"


I think he knows
When he touches me
What I've done
To hold him,
Keep him,
Tie him to me
And there it is...Good twist! YOU'VE done something wrong. 

but his soul is as black as mine
he does not care
to mention the fact
he does not dare
to break the spell
that binds us both
and keeps us
prisoned
in this
unholy
alliance
Very satisfying ending. I like that evil is satisfied with evil. And to maintain their desire they know it needs to be. The end justifying the means. An age old question.

Now it's Your Turn! Do we have any Pro Poets out there? Anybody that wants to join in feel free to do so!

2 comments:

Lauren said...

Interesting. The beginning felt very feminine, but that changed as I read. I caught "something very wrong here" from the first line--don't know if you intended that. That single rhyme in the last stanza seals it.

Lauren

Michael Offutt, Phantom Reader said...

I don't know if I like it all that much. It seems to be two poems rammed together to form one. I mean they are obviously related...but I think I'd like all the "black" lines to be separated from the parts where those aren't included and just have two poems.