Habits (revision3)

[RC James]

Hi James. The lines are quite nice, but the poem as a whole is unintelligible. You need to throw in some hints for the reader, otherwise it's a nice, impenetrable poem.

1. Storing away Stephanie's old habits with demons may mean something to you, but not to the reader. If you throw in a line like that and never come back to it, it's frustrating.
2. Until the end I don't know whether Stephanie is a madwoman, a ghost, a cat, a bird, an AIDS victim, ot the cuckoo in a cuckoo clock. Or a combination of these. It's not the sort of ambiguity that is enjoyable, it just feels like the writer forgot that there was a reader.
3. The simile at the end is nice in isolation, but in the context of the rest of the poem, leaves me no wiser.
4. The high watermark of vagueness is reached in L12

Stephanie obviously lives with the guy who is also addicted, they've obviously been though some hard times together, like the old habit, that they'd given up and stored in the closet with other demons they tried to drop and do away with. The poem is, again, obviously about drug addiction, and the lines in that context become, again, obvious.  I think yoiu're being aggressively facetious in your listing of who Stephanie might be, really kinda.....  The ending is, again, obvious, in the context of drug addiction, the narrator is drawn into the "old habit"as he watches her head for the dealer's corner. I'm not going to expand on the content because, again, it's obvious. RC