03-18-2014, 06:00 AM
I.
I don’t want to look through my memory box;
I slammed it shut, duct taped and left it.
Yet each time I make my way home,
it creeps out from under my bed
like the monsters most children fear.
I’d take claws and teeth over this feeling.
The monsters line doesn't need to be there. It could be implied by the lines before and after it.
How long ago did your past release you?
The strength of mine reaches across miles.
The pull of home’s jagged horizon
is sweet, simpering, and sickening.
Why do you ask a question? You're talking to the reader. Or you're talking to someone specific, the mother or somebody. That's a popular way to write. Talking about yourself to the reader because the reader can relate. But why waste the time and space? Most popular writing over the last 50 so years is adolescent writing.
But I am done looking into mirrors
searching for the child I used to be.
The last time that my tear ducts
tried to betray my fighting heart,
I became tightly clenched fists and jaw,
screaming at the sadness to stop.
Everything after the first line about being done looking in mirrors is poorly written. Do you see why somebody might think that? It's best to have things like that out with yourself, it's your poem, you fight with yourself over it. I'm just saying.
I might not be able to swallow it whole
like the twenty-six pills 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.
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.
Those 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.
The need to break away is non-negotiable;
home rests on my shoulders like stones.
Those bold lines are what stand out. The other lines are weak, melodramatic and just kind of there.
II.
On a greyhound bus with a stiff back
my mother rode out of her hometown
three days after high school graduation.
Someday she’ll understand my reasons
and let me take myself away from her
the same way she had to do back then.
That's poorly written as poetry or prose.
Or she’ll die like her mother did,
sinking into unwatched dusty corners
as the shower bar turned into a clothes rack
and the crazy piled up against the door.
I know now why my mother didn’t rescue her.
Stand out ideas. The second one is better, the first might work. But you have the stanza to consider.
I wish they had let that 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.
You could write a whole poem on this stanza. You could single out situations instead of overloading one poem with all these things.
Now 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 a final family visit,
a visit to my mother’s monstrous memory box.
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.
You're writing a family novel in a poem. The poem isn't long enough for that, and the long poem you have here consists mainly of filler lines. Maybe you need to write a poem like this, but you still have to learn how to do it. Nobody can tell you how to do it, then it wouldn't be your poem. Learning how to write a decent line is harder than learning how to deal with whatever emotion compels you to write. The emotion makes it harder not easier.
Even if this is all fiction.
Go through and cut out everything you're uncertain about. Then add only things that you are certain about, as long as that takes. And keep doing that until something works.
I don’t want to look through my memory box;
I slammed it shut, duct taped and left it.
Yet each time I make my way home,
it creeps out from under my bed
like the monsters most children fear.
I’d take claws and teeth over this feeling.
The monsters line doesn't need to be there. It could be implied by the lines before and after it.
How long ago did your past release you?
The strength of mine reaches across miles.
The pull of home’s jagged horizon
is sweet, simpering, and sickening.
Why do you ask a question? You're talking to the reader. Or you're talking to someone specific, the mother or somebody. That's a popular way to write. Talking about yourself to the reader because the reader can relate. But why waste the time and space? Most popular writing over the last 50 so years is adolescent writing.
But I am done looking into mirrors
searching for the child I used to be.
The last time that my tear ducts
tried to betray my fighting heart,
I became tightly clenched fists and jaw,
screaming at the sadness to stop.
Everything after the first line about being done looking in mirrors is poorly written. Do you see why somebody might think that? It's best to have things like that out with yourself, it's your poem, you fight with yourself over it. I'm just saying.
I might not be able to swallow it whole
like the twenty-six pills 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.
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.
Those 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.
The need to break away is non-negotiable;
home rests on my shoulders like stones.
Those bold lines are what stand out. The other lines are weak, melodramatic and just kind of there.
II.
On a greyhound bus with a stiff back
my mother rode out of her hometown
three days after high school graduation.
Someday she’ll understand my reasons
and let me take myself away from her
the same way she had to do back then.
That's poorly written as poetry or prose.
Or she’ll die like her mother did,
sinking into unwatched dusty corners
as the shower bar turned into a clothes rack
and the crazy piled up against the door.
I know now why my mother didn’t rescue her.
Stand out ideas. The second one is better, the first might work. But you have the stanza to consider.
I wish they had let that 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.
You could write a whole poem on this stanza. You could single out situations instead of overloading one poem with all these things.
Now 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 a final family visit,
a visit to my mother’s monstrous memory box.
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.
You're writing a family novel in a poem. The poem isn't long enough for that, and the long poem you have here consists mainly of filler lines. Maybe you need to write a poem like this, but you still have to learn how to do it. Nobody can tell you how to do it, then it wouldn't be your poem. Learning how to write a decent line is harder than learning how to deal with whatever emotion compels you to write. The emotion makes it harder not easier.
Even if this is all fiction.
Go through and cut out everything you're uncertain about. Then add only things that you are certain about, as long as that takes. And keep doing that until something works.