12-28-2015, 08:07 AM
(12-27-2015, 11:47 PM)Schmitzhugen Wrote:
- The masses, He
- Vociferates, laugh and jest,
- Drink and be merry, drink and are merry?
- Breathtakingly ignorant,
- Achingly blissful.
- Across the bridge forms
- Blend, eyes hazed, minds
- Numbed, in circles they
- Saunter, back upon themselves,
- Glide the shadows, as why inversion?
- Silhouettes dance on
- Bleak cobbled stone.
- Adamantine chains bind;
- Stark and stripped, myriads lie,
- As prowls the Beast, all inversion, again, but this works better
- Light extinguished,
- Herding its prey.
- Out of the club they
- Spilt, raucously why not "spill" or "spilled?"
- Giggling- Taxi! they,
- Cried, eyes dimly bright on
- Hanging feet-fixated heads-
- Oh- What wonderful brogues!
- Naturally, oxblood is very ‘in’ this Winter.
- How utterly splendid.
- Indeed.
- But… Gucci favour burgundy.
- For how long now?
- Better part of a month.
- How mortified I am; there- a pair have been ordered.
- How utterly splendid.
- Indeed.
- Shapes crawl towards nothing,
- To darkness reach;
- On fours they
- Loiter with passive disregard.
- Content are they, for the why inversion here?
- Mind can conjure a
- Heaven of Hell- and
- What light have they known?
- Decisions loom,
- Futures hover with
- Impending regret.
- What choices shall be made-
- Today and tomorrow,
- as eternity beckons?
- To revel in glorious apathy-
- shall I watch a little Netflix
- - or is a joint enough?
- Cast away shackles, He beseeches,
- See light, in rare lucidity, for
- ethereal beauty so staggering.
- Painful? Yes. But stunning,
- Nevertheless.
- They awaken,
- In ones and twos,
- From blissful slumber,
- Standing, before the darkness
- Visible, to embrace that last
- Inch of greatness, and
- Horror,
- Too long held captive-
- Shocked they flinch from need comma after "shocked"
- Light so blinding, as
- Flesh is singed by unruly flame; the
- Beast appears, as man
- Himself chastises,
- Cowering to mental confines, "in" rather than "to?"
- And the ranks of the
- Hoi polloi, in their
- Intoxicating naïvety, and
- Compelling simplicity.
First off, a heads-up: This is my first attempt at critique for serious workshopping, so it may be either too lenient, too harsh, or simply inadquate. You have been warned!
My initial impression, partly from the writer's handle here on Pig Pen, is that he or she may be a native German speaker. I get this impression from word order in sentences (e.g. L10, L15, L37) where the conversational German verb-subject order is considered an inversion and archaic in English. L10 could be a continuation of L9, but then there should be no comma at the end of L9.
There are some problems in the first verse (LL1-5). Capitalizing "He" in L1 may be meant to show it's the end of a quoted phrase, but then just use quotes - as it is, "He," capitalized, indicates God is speaking. Or was that your intent? On the next line, "Vociferates" does resonate, rhythmically, but implies shouting or just noise. On L3, "Drink and be merry" doesn't agree, grammatically, with the prior line (should be "Drink and are merry," or the like. On LL4-5 the point of view is hard to fathom: if "He," why does He find them painful ("achingly")? That attitude or viewpoint is not carried through in the remainder of the poem - could be interesting if it were.
LL31-32 come across as ironic, where much else is neutral or sympathetic. Are they necessary? They also bring up another problem: starting with the first line (as noted above) there are a number of sequences which look like conversation but aren't punctuated as such. Some quotation marks would help the reader thread through them properly (for example, L31-32, each set off by its own set of quotes, could inform us that person A sneers "Splendid" while person B returns "Indeed," ironically.
A debatable point: LL69-70, you say "the hoi polloi" but "hoi polloi" translates as "the people" or "those people," I believe. So you could be saying "the the (sic) people " - but in English "hoi polloi" is often regarded as a monobloc concept like "unwashed" so saying "the hoi polloi" would only bother students of Greek... which I am not.
You might also consider italicizing "hoi Polloi" in L70, indicating it's a foreign phrase.
Overall: good images and flow. If there's a basic problem, it's consistency of tone. Do we have a God-Lucifer conversation here, as in the Book of Job? Does the speaker like hoi polloi or hold them in contempt? Does the speaker's attitude evolve, based on what he sees and describes? If not, and he's just tracking with closeups, what's his motivation?
Interesting read! Thank you; hope the comments (and those in bold above) are helpful.
Non-practicing atheist