Janitorial Worker

[paranoid marvin]

OK, that I can respond to. You may likely be right. my intent was to present the last stage in a cycle, the stage before death in both the building and the person. I did not want vibrancy or lively wording in the poem, nor did I want it to seem energetic, which most have urged to do. Evidently I did not succeed in transmitting that. The build and the woman are both tired and both are nearing the end of their usefulness. The bleach is somewhat symbolic of the fading of things as we get closer to death. The woman is not a crone (or anything else), she is just a tired old woman, still working at a job she hates, but she needs the money to survive. This is about that point in life where the tiredness sets in, where life becomes a balance between the energy drain needed to keep living and the desire to do so. As time continues we eventually reach the point where the energy drain is more than we wish to pay to stay alive, and as my mother would say, we "give up the ghost." These were the things in my head when I wrote this. Certainly I could spiff up the adjectives and make it maybe more entertaining, but I was looking for the mundane, not to entertain. To me, the idea of a gray-haired mop sounds comedic, there was nothing comedic in my intention. No, I will just have to consider this experiment a failure, as you and ella, and paranoid marvin seem to have missed the point of it, the point was less than clear. In this  give myself a B for conceptualization, but an F for execution.

Best,

Dale

Dale

If people interpret your work in different ways helps to make it a success; that some people don't interpret the same way you don't doesn't make it a failure.

The reason I suggested crone was that my understanding was that the poem wasn't about her, so what I should have said was ditch 'grey-haired woman', and just use crone. This was because once syllable or beat spent on her disregards her, whilst 4 syllables or beats (in a poem of only 16) makes her central. But that's my opinion; it doesn't necessarily make it better or worse , simply shifts the focus (in my opinion).

As I mentioned I like it. Old house , old woman, and a artificial substance being used to effectively burn away and renew. There's a great sense of smell in the poem, which is unusual as most tend to around audio or visual senses. A musty old house, a musty old woman contrasted with the sharp, acrid, over-powering smell of bleach.