Masterpiece (scraps)

[leesharks]

Found amid the remnants of a late-night study session. Thought I'd share this weird nine-liner. Criticism always appreciated, although this (quite obviously) isn't serious at all, just a by-product of procrastination.

masterpiece

we were having
a beautiful conversation
and then you used the phrase:
"that sucks monkey balls"
and ruined my poem
damn you, i said
to the half-moon clippings
as i trimmed my nails at 2 am
this will never be a masterpiece now

It’s interesting that the poem replies, not to the offending phrase (“that sucks monkey balls”), but to the “half-moon clippings”: “damn you, i said / to the half-moon clippings”. Although it’s the monkey balls that ruin the masterpiece, the poem damns the nail clippings, almost like it distractedly “forgets” to assign blame where it’s due, or transfers the half-attended censure it feels for the external world to its own self as clippings/remnants/fragments/pieces.

This moment speaks to a kind of poetics of distraction that’s central to what’s working in this piece--and perhaps, I would guess, important more generally to your conception of poetry. The poem wasn’t really attending to the “beautiful conversation” in the first place, it was busy superimposing little fragments of that beauty unto itself as discarded clippings. When the monkey balls burst into its attention, it really has no choice but to incorporate that—it’s made and lost, as poem, in the same moment. It could never be a masterpiece, but maybe it could, and that’s what’s endearing about it.

That said, of the poem's nine lines, I thought ll. 4 and 6-9 were more effectively grounded in concrete detail. I wanted the first three lines especially to be replaced with something that does more to embody the abstractions to which they refer.

Or in terms that more openly reveal the derivative and pedantic nature of my criticism, “show, don’t tell.”

-Lee