Sad Old Men

[RiverNotch]

Sad Old Men


drifting down

streets of stone

all cracked and cold



looking for love

when old loves are dead

and new loves leave the birthing beds

[celtickilduff]

My father is 75 years old . We live together. st, one is cold, established, unable to change without the ability to bend. all cracked and cold. They are done, withered waiting to die knowing that this life has passed them by. old loves dead. I think that old loves are there a part of who they are,taken for granted, resented, scorned but not dead. loves leave the birthing bed. birthing bed could be the promise that once was. love leaves it maybe with a backward glance but with encouragement to return to that original most sacred love possibly. my interpretation. Very touching. You have a vision, ability to be in touch with a specific perception. Well done.

[Bunx]

Really enjoyed the simplicity and flow of this poem. Also enjoyed the metaphor with love dying and living in cycles. Awesome read thanks for the post!

[Erthona]

RN,

I'm not a big fan of white space, but here I would say it merely enhances the poem and the poem is not dependent on it which is the correct usage of it.

I'm trying to read this as something more than a generalization and see it as more archetypal. However the more times I read it, I see nothing more than the first time I read it. I think whatever you intended for the piece is not manifesting, at least not for me, but then again I am an sad old man and truthfully whatever you are romanticizing I see it not in myself. So I must conclude that this is a metaphor for something else, or you don't know your subject particularly well. Sorry, I'm sure I must be missing something.

Dale

[RiverNotch]

The white space was never intended, but I guess it does work. When I first posted this, I was like, "what the heck? why are you being all like this to me, word editor! get back to your place".

It is a bit of a stiff generalization, and the novelty of the poem does go out once its lack of concreteness becomes apparent. I was romanticizing old age, or at least what old age looks like to someone young (and hey, I'm one of those peeps who are young! WOOO) -- how love ends up decaying, becoming a shady cycle of life and death, of old age and youth. Well, something like that. It might be that element of youth -- to me, the poem reads in a detached way, just as if the speaker were not part of the subject's group, and, as noted, I'm not one of those old men -- that makes the poem read as if the speaker doesn't entirely know what he's saying, though I think that's less a telling deficiency on my part, and more a telling deficiency on the speaker's character. But in general, I may just be reading too much into it -- just as you trying to glean more from the poem than its vague sense of archetypalness (archetypicality? archetypici-ah, whatever) might be trying to get fiber from a piece of meat. Or what I'm saying, even that vague idea of a decaying wheel, really isn't quite there yet -- I dunno.

If you have a suggestion as to what I can pare down or possibly add to make that point clearer, you're very welcome. I'm thinking that maybe I should just wait a good ten, twenty years though -- then I'll get back to the subject, and see if what I've gotten on it is any better. But again, I don't really know.

[ellajam]

You could cut "all" and find a better word for "looking for". And I'm not a fan of the title.

[Todd]

I think you could cut line 4 and not lose much.

[rayheinrich]

The poem comes off as presumptuous, because it's seems a generalization.
You should make it clear you aren't talking from knowledge, but from observation.
If you did that it would sound genuine. You should either write about what you know
or lie convincingly.

[71degrees]

"If you have a suggestion as to what I can pare down…"


Drifting down streets
of cracked and cold stone

Even after old loves are dead,
new loves leave their birthing beds

[michael the tenant]

RN,

I'm not a big fan of white space, but here I would say it merely enhances the poem and the poem is not dependent on it which is the correct usage of it.

I'm trying to read this as something more than a generalization and see it as more archetypal. However the more times I read it, I see nothing more than the first time I read it. I think whatever you intended for the piece is not manifesting, at least not for me, but then again I am an sad old man and truthfully whatever you are romanticizing I see it not in myself. So I must conclude that this is a metaphor for something else, or you don't know your subject particularly well. Sorry, I'm sure I must be missing something.

Dale

..agreed

[RiverNotch]

Here's a hit:

Vision of the Future

We'll drift down streets
of cold, corrupted stone,
when all old loves are dead
and new loves leave the birthing-beds.