Oceans of Silver Cracks (REVISED)

[underthewronghat]

Okay, My first edit it posted. Thank you for understanding my feelings and providing the best response I could hoped for. Let me know if this was a direction you suggested I turn to. Quite frankly, I really enjoyed rewriting it this way and I think it's taken on a new shape. What are your thoughts?

Howdy QV

Okay, I'm coming back to this.  I think you stretched the form out --it may be a little long now for what it is.  It's a moment of emotion, sleeplessness, a breakdown, a giving up on sleep, and giving in to the keyboard.

In the original, I liked the buildup of line-lengths heading into the "heavenly fire."  That created some pressure.  We are missing a sense of previous events, however, an antecedent to this insomnia.  Now we may not need the previous events mentioned explicitly, maybe just a setting.  Maybe we just need a description of you doing something while being completely preoccupied with something else (a cause for the buildup).  This description of the speaker at the computer is simple enough, but there's no hint in there.  It's too innocuous, and we wonder why it's included.  Let this intro get interrupted a little with some odd, perhaps emotional, actions or thoughts.  To that extent, I like the phytoplankton, which seems stray, but serves to depart from just sitting in front of the computer.  Now it's a little undersea.  I'd push toward that, so that when you get to "heavenly fire" the line lengths are increasing, and the water imagery is starting to overpower.  This is more what I mean by "stretching things out."  Stretch the imagery, the surreality, until you get to the break.  I like that you are explicit about the result --you show that there are no tears, just words typed into the computer.

The new edit also has some interesting possibilities with repetition.  Plath does this very well, and for my money, it works best after the break (as you have it).  You can be repetitive, however, while surprising us.

Depths of Hell
Depths of the Sea
The blood of the Sea

When you get to the more overpowering repetition, I think you correctly keep the lines short.  It really marks a breakdown in language, an inability to express something with words where pounding fists or sobbing might make more sense.  Robert Frost does it:

"and miles to go before I sleep,
and miles to go before I sleep."

Plath's poem "Daddy" really hammers out her emotion with heavy rhyme, repetition, and short lines.

You get something really spinning with screen, emotion, face, ocean...  I think you need to fiddle with those a little more. Less AABB, more ABCCACBB crazy...  Also, with those repetitions, you're gluing them together with less active verbs, "holding," "containing," "look."  Go for some movement there: "biting," "lip-syncing," "selling," "diving."  Get some psychedelic action going in the ocean there.  Plus the enjambment tends to sound more severe when there are action verbs.

I'm not sure if you need a complete denouement.  This doesn't seem to be a poem about the mermaids going away, or the words drying up.  I think if you're going to see the rocket launch, write about the launch, and not so much about what happens when that excitement is over.  Cheers for giving it another go.  Keep on writing!  :-)