Masks

[kindofahippy]

Hi!

I wrote this for Purim 2013. More spiritual angst.

Twisting, contorting as we try to force it "contorting" means the same thing as "twisting", and it reads as repetition for the sake of the meter. Consider "turning" instead"
and stuff ourselves in life's corset, "into" would work better for meter
playing a thousand roles with nary a fuss "never" would work as well as archaic "nary"
leading, supporting, but never us. It may be possible to be less verbose with this stanza. The essence of it is that we never play the role of ourselves, with the rest of the material being filler to enforce that

No more maddening scheme could be devised,
on display, in the open, yet disguised,
as we slog along, not dance, not hike
being who we must, not who we'd like.This stanza is excellent in that it provides metaphor without abstractions. You use concrete items to support your idea, but where it fails is the meter. The change from iambic to trochaic in the last two lines makes this read very poorly out loud.

But comes Purim and the briefest chance unesecesary inversion forces this rhyme
to offer the world, and ourselves, a fleeting glance "and ourselves" makes the line an awkward pentameter amongst tetrameter.
of who we are, in garb and mask.
Dare we now take up the task? another inversion that isn't strictly needed, since "Do we dare to take the task?" would work equally well, and consider doing away with the question mark on this line

To hide? Without, perhaps.
But inside something deeper taps.
The mask offers yet a glimpse
of what routine routinely crimps."something" and "routine", as abstractions with a plethora of meanings to different readers, may muddle this stanza

Under cloak of a Purimspiel
take a dare, be brave, be real!
Choose a mask but if you do,
know that the mask might unmask you.The play on ambiguity here enforces the sense of how the harder we try to hide who we are, the more obvious it becomes.

Nu?

nb

Interesting poem, I haven't had the chance to read anything quite like it. It brings to mind Shakespeare's masquerade in Romeo and Juliet, though that was a prose piece.

I found the metrical quirks tolerable while reading the poem out loud several times; however, because it does rhyme, it needs a more rigid structure, either iambic or trochaic but not both randomly.

The sonics could also use an improvement. Too many of the stanzas begin and end on conjunctions, such as "to", "but", "the", and "of". These weak linking words don't carry any imagery or cultural context on them the way a good solid concrete noun does.