The Darkness of Beauty

[milo]

Thank you for your feedback, rowens and milo I see what you mean about "farce", milo. I'm surprised that no-one commented on that vagueness when I published this elsewhere. In real life (this poem is based on a piece of graffiti I saw) the line was something like "to all downtrodden men, reclaim your masculinity, it's what women want". The repetition of "board" was deliberate; when I wrote this I'd been reading free verse poems by D. H. Lawrence, who uses repetition a lot.

I actually use repetition a ton, it is one of my favorite devices. Repetition is a double-edged sword, though, sometimes it adds by strengthening a concept and sometimes it detracts by reading as redundant. I didn't feel the repetition added to the meaning in this piece which is why I mentioned it, but I don't want to discount repetition as a device!