03-17-2014, 06:09 AM
I agree that this can be improved via shortening. I especially like everything between “That fierceness” and “reassurance”, for example, so the job might be to collect and mold together lines like these. Anyhow, some more commentary (take whatever is useful, toss the rest...)
Quote:You want to reduce me to ‘mommy issues?’
I may be a little rickety these days
but Fear and I played marbles and jacks
I rode in cars double-seated with Anxiety
and shared my lunch table with Anger and Hatred
Playing a game against Fear makes sense; I can easily see Fear as an enemy, to be defeated. Riding in a car with anxiety also works for me; I picture the narrator in the back seat, glancing now and then to Anxiety; the later nervously twiddling its thumbs, staring out the window as an excuse for avoiding conversation. I can't picture sharing my lunch table with Anger and Hatred. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be personifying...
I don’t care to look through my memory box
I slammed it shut, duct taped and left it
But each time I make my way home
somehow it creeps out from under my bed
like the monsters most children fear
I’d take those claws and teeth over this
How long ago did the fear leave you?
The strength of mine reaches across miles
The pull of home’s ‘golden’ horizon
is sweet, simpering, and sickening
One of the first two lines can go, otherwise it can be redundant. If you don't care to look in the box, why do you have to duct tape it? I like the alliteration of the last line.
But I am done looking into mirrors
searching for the child I used to be
I haven’t fallen apart in weeks
and the last time that my tear ducts
tried to betray my fighting heart,
I became tight clenched fists and jaw
and I screamed at the sadness
until I was angrier at it than myself.
I might not be able to swallow it whole
like the twenty-six pills I took at breakfast
but I pull it back from my eyes and throat
to stow away under collarbones
and in the tense tilt of my neck
Not sure how to interpret the 26 pills. Is the narrator fighting some pernicious disease, or are the pills the inevitable domain of aging? I like the collarbones and tilted neck; perhaps a stanza dedicated to “anatomical annoyances” mightn't hurt.
I don’t know if it’s still there now
I’m sure it’ll arrive here soon
to check up on me, dissolve my resolve,
and drag me back across state lines
That fierceness is new to my fight;
usually I am soft sobs, bitterly woven
into a cocoon of salt and desperation
quietly petering out into relief
and silent self-absorbed reassurances
But such politeness got me nowhere
People with unfeeling consciences
like blaring biohazard warnings
or blank-eyed, crossed-bones signs
to warn away from toxicity and poison;
they paid no attention to quiet objection,
steamrolling over my shrinking spine
and neither does my sadness, it seems
Have I stepped past that now, at last?
Quiet whisperings or taut muscles,
blood or sweat or tears or ink
I don’t know what cuts the ties to childhood
I might still choke on my airline ticket
and I might not drive off into the sunset
at the end of the next strenuous summer
But goddamnit, I will make it
I will have to dig graves in my heart
but those eulogies can write themselves.
I’m not here to mourn my priority list
or validate a need for re-grouted tiles
A greyhound bus, a stiff back, a pile of cash
My mother rode that out of her hometown
three days after her high school graduation
Someday she’ll understand my reasons
and let me wheel myself away from her
the same way she had to do back then
Or she’ll die like her mother did
Sinking into unwatched dusty corners
as the shower bar turns into a clothes rack
and the crazy piles up against the door
Did anyone rescue her from that?
"Wheel away" brings the same disease/aging ambiguity as above. I like “shower bar turns into a clothes rack”, and more so than the crazy piling up. I also like the grandfather/lawyer lines below. But yes, I'm (1) a bit of an inexperienced "long poem" reader, but also (2) it does start sounding the same.
I wish they had let it be my case study
Gave me one more hard-won math lesson
on how to subtract myself with less damage
On how to play the polite family game
of Sunday morning tea and insincerity
Only the old get to stop bullshitting, I guess
I told my grandfather I wanted to be a lawyer
and he said my brother would make a great one
I never learned how not to slam down
a hot cup of tea with lemon and honey,
and pretend sharing blood meant that mine
didn’t scream beneath the same bone structure
Everything about home speaks of monsters
Wanting to drain my parents dry is cruel
but survival instincts hold strong, it seems
I wonder if my compassion used to lie
in the left wrist I broke in kindergarten;
I think I lost track of it that far back
Those split bones were from the last visit
to the monsters, or sisters, of my mother
Ancient people used to divine with bones,
scattering them across a table and Seeing
Hindsight tells me mine spoke back then;
Like mother, like daughter
Consider ending without referring back to the narrator. Just a final a metaphore would do fine.