Poetry Forum

The Placid sky above my head
Was always there to shine
A beam or two of dust-filled rays
With falling dirt confined

I often languor freedom stale
And feel the heavy air
Where every paradox in breath
Subsists a vacant stare

To quell that stifling fatal press
I circle cracking lips
Producing endless sighs of gas
Towards apocalypse

I grasp at meat in patter songs
And search a book for rhymes
To beat the shears of life and death
By penning fatal twine

Perhaps I’ve won our human clash
In plastic shining words
And formed a gloried path in flesh
By inking dogs absurd

The bark of death was never heard
But wrought a gnawing fiend
To chew my corpse of fameless life
That lived and ripened green

I felt the heavy cracking boughs
Beholding worms in mud
As rotten sugar filled my core
I dazed away the thud

My argument’s a natal scrawl
Whose signal died a sign
I cannot say where this refers
But paint a crude design

So here’s my plot-less tale that's told
Beside a bubbling brook
That babbles shifting shades of hope
Of chances I forsook

To fringe upon a formless draft
Denying barren stone
Into a host of chiding words
To goad a rising tone

(05-09-2014, 12:51 AM)fogglethorpe Wrote: [ -> ]Brownlie..I appreciate the attention to craft in this piece. I am old school, so the perfect iambic tetrameter/iambic trimeter quatrains are very appealing to me. It has a classic vibe throughout.

I will admit, the theme is a bit oblique..but a little mystique is ok with me. I get the sense the narrator is speaking from the grave.

Overall, a fine poem.

Thanks for the read. I appreciate it.

Hi Browlie,

it certainly reads most smoothly, it's nice and fluid, you've done a good job getting the meter right. However, it doesn't make a great deal of sense to me, as though it were written merely for the meter and rhyme. I'm assuming that this is intentional, though to what purpose I cannot pretend to know. to me, it seems as though a dog-gnawed corpse is speaking, which is interesting, though I kind of wish that what he had said made more sense! Still, even though nonsensical, it was nice to read. Cheers, Marianne

i think i see what you're attempting.
he poem is written to be a good poem it's written for the sole purpose of critique...i think. on there own each verse works well except the 2nd whose 1st line i cannot decipher. there seems to be some good lines here but it's hard to name them as most of them lead nowhere. the meter and end rhyme work well but again fail more than a lot (for me)as the content is too much of a ramble. i'm think the poem was done this way purposefully in which case it does actually feel as it succeeds. i'm on the fence here, i hate it and like it a lot. i'm not sure if i'm stupid or the poem is

thanks for the read

Thank you for reading, the poem is certainly of the mish-mash variety. I had originally titled it The Courtier, because it was supposed to indicate that grandiose style that a member of the courts would attempt. The dog would be the representation of death in Paradise Lost which is a literal interpretation of the fear that the body will be defiled upon death. But, enough of that I retitled it For Critique because I didn't know what to do with this mish mash of lines.