I really like this. I really, really like this poem. The reason being there is something very modern about it: and how strange! How strange that it is so modern! It is moody and angular and urban, it is vast and open and broad. It's a broad, angular poem. I love it. It's not the kind of thing I've encountered very often. It reminds me of a particular writer or other, but I'm not quite sure who. I'm thinking Pynchon, Vonnegut and the like. And it is so strange because I read it as being very much a fantasy poem, an old fantasy poem, a sword-and-sorcery fantasy poem, but so modern. That's a good angle.
I like the form. Free verse, rhyme to the wind, modern modern modern. And the choppy lines are great, one line has four or five steps and the next doesn't even have one. The composition is good. It's
visually pleasing, which is lost even on a lot of high-literary poetry. It's presented like a Mayakovsky, almost. It's presented like a futurist or constructivist poem, but it's not quite that. And the punctuation is nice - a full stop at the end of every line, bam bam bam bam bam bam, no messing around. Each line is final. Straight-faced. Just business.
That just-business theme is carried out into all of it, also. The way it is written is very poignant. It's distanced. The poet is very distant from the actual events. He kills one, kills the other... But then, there is commentary. He's not struck by the events in the usual way. If someone came at me I'd be terrified and if I killed someone I'd be terrified. I have never killed anyone, (and though I can't say no ones has ever came at me with a sword!) the poet is clearly used to this kind of thing. It's day-in day-out it's ordinary it's usual and it's even a little boring to him it's routine. He engages with the murder the way an industrial proletarian engages with the machine he operates. Pull this lever, that one, that one, next... And that's demonstrated by the 'Ground to Sky cut. [this is what happens]' thing. Matter of fact, explaining simply to an observer. But like I said, there is commentary - 'Heaven to Hell cut' - god! Augh! And, 'very still'. Damn. Even regarding the beauty of the blood, which can only be regarded by someone who is very, very depersonalized.
So, we have a hardened merc, I guess, who is so used to killing he has begun to see the poetry in it. Which is wonderful, and this is a very real thing - there was a book of interviews I read, with the Rwanda killers, you know, when they were ordered out into the marshes to cut down Tutsi people with machetes. They're haunted souls, now, rotting in prison, but to them the death is nothing. They were so used to death, they could not see it as death. For them, they said, after even only a few days, it was like cutting down the grain. And let me tell you, every one of those soldiers is a poet.
So this is a very real thing. And I think you do it well.
The imagery is good. Sparse. Broad and angular, like I said, I feel like the language and the symbols and even the narrative itself are all united on this, which is good. Broad, angular. Long, clean cuts. Metallic.
But for me the symbols are wrong! Agh, that title! That title! It takes me totally out of it. For me this is not an inn. I at no point in the poem felt that this was an inn. Nothing about this poem evokes an inn. Inns are not broad, angular, sparse. Or if you're writing about an inn in this way you have to do a lot more work than you've done here. Especially, when you bring up scimitars, it does not put me in the right place. Inns are dark age Western Europe. We're not there, to me. To me we are two Saracens holding out a mosque. We're a couple of Moors, hanging out before a palace. Whatever. If it must be a place of lodgings, it's an ordained brothel of Innana, or something. Not an inn, anything but an inn! A Room at the Innana, that'd be good.
The last two lines belie this, also. The last two lines!
Quote:A few days behind on the rent and they send goons to collect.
Man, times are sure gettin' hard.
I mean lets not mince words here. This is a terrible ending. It's out of continuity with the rest of the piece. My Saracen guard is a thug, but more than that - it's not modern. You've suddenly dragged me back to a pastiche of Chaucer, or whatever. Back to bawdy fantasy. It's modern, yes, a bit, with the slang, and all. But it's not with the rest. And also I do not see how any of this comes up to the conclusion that times are getting hard - the warrior who is in the previous stanzas is in perfect continuity with his surroundings, who is hardened and used to all of this, and so on, who is so distant from the combat that he is a wisened poet - suddenly says, 'Oh, this life of mine!' No, I don't get it, it's wrong, it's not the same poet.
If you want to make it into an inn, you need more stanzas before this, and if you want to show me that times are hard for our dear poet, you need more verses afterwards. But you should not have any more verses before or afterwards! Unless this is part of a series of poems, if you want my advice, reframe it. Take the inn out of it, but you don't have to. But don't frame it as times are getting hard. Frame it as: things are as usual.
EDIT: Oh, also, I missed adding it earlier, but I really really want to say, the way you put words together is *beautiful*. It's really readable, it's a joy to read. The words and their images, together, in a choppy, geometric way. I've never seen anything like it and it's something I want you to teach me. LOL. But I am serious about that. Anyway, these are what I mean: "Headsize stone block construction./Opening not quite two man wide." Augh! (This is what made me think 'Mosque', also, chiseled stone and all that.) It also flawlessly sets up the whole 'he can't get through' thing that becomes their foil. That foil is a really interesting part of the poetry that I haven't really addressed here - perhaps the poem is not about the killer at all, but the soldiers. Doomed, from a moment of missed footing, from a miscalculation of the width of the door - dizzying, momentary, existential, I love it. The other line: "One of them angles right side forward with a spear thrust as the other broad face struggles through beside him." This is
mastery of grammar. Perfect, but manipulated to be interesting. Almost Kafka, even.
