10-10-2015, 05:22 PM
(10-10-2015, 05:03 AM)Keith Wrote: Behave yourself tonight,
and please don’t embarrass us. Maybe remove the comma, or move it to after please.
she warned.
Piss off
I thought These two lines feel unneeded. This already feels like the very heart of the next stanza, so the contrasts end up running too fast.
I won’t dear
I said.
But five drinks in
I think I’m 17 again.
A non-smoker cadging fags, Good grief, I struggled with this: I first thought this was providing another stroke for the setting, that the house's hosts were eyed the same way the speaker did his, well, I'm assuming wife. Then I realized how non-smoker should have played with fags, and boy I'm a bit ashamed. But I do think the problem's partly with the poem, too: there's very little show of the set.
swallowing shot glasses
then another pint,
swapping party anthems
for Springsteen and Motorhead,
I air guitar my way to the
wrong side of another day.
Her gun metal frown Would be a bit clearer if this was spelled "gunmetal" instead.
was one step in front
ready to take the head-shot.
My reflection in the bathroom
leaned towards me
and smiled
hollow-eyed
and cheek-boned. There's a redundant air to these two lines. Both show essentially the same thing, both sound essentially the same, and for a poem this sparse, it stands out, and I don't exactly find them referring to any earlier symbols. Either eliminate one, or better yet synthesize.
Get in the car we're going home.
Two miles in
I'm 52 again
snoring in the passenger seat. There's a deeper thought here, I think, that's somehow lost, some profound observation on lost youth. I caught a good whiff of it going through the poem, a good but for me too mild one: maybe a wee bit of tweaking to make the kissing of images, the dreamy and drunk passage of time, stronger, but no real need to make it explicit.
The show of lost youth is great. I didn't exactly feel what the speaker felt -- perhaps that's because of my youth -- but I very clearly smelled it, and I guess that detached air made the whole show more intimate, more in my face, but not exactly in my face. Anyway, hope this helps.