Skeleton On The Sea Floor -- revision

[Lizzie]

Although thematically the topic is a bit overdone, your perception of it adds a freshness to it. S2 is excellent, I think that S1 could be chopped down some as it is a bit verbose and repetitive, making it seem a bit forced. As this is in mild I'll leave it at that.

Best,

dale

Hi Dale, good to see you

Which topic? Everyone has a different idea of what the poem's about, so I'm just curious. Yeah, I agree that it needs to be pruned back for now. I was adding in descriptive elements about the skeleton to tie that bit in, but I probably swung a little too far in the other direction. Yeah, it was a little forced, so I'm not surprised that it sounded that way, unfortunately. Thanks for reading and weighing in.

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Reinstate the original. It had a vitality that the edits don't.
It's impossible to edit poetry beyond a point (another blanket statement that no one will agree with...)

You don't like your own ideas for a re-write???

Is it that you don't like identifying the skeleton as being the woman? Yeah, it can go back to being Jane Doe at the bottom of the ocean, I have no problem with that, but there were still structural problems in the middle that needed correction. Right?

When I initially wrote it, I envisioned the blanket bit in the middle being more of an equal player, so that there would be three images that would all be examples of something that's been there all along seeming to suddenly appear. I have a hate relationship with my comforter at night, it's always creeping up over my face, and I have to swat it away several times a night, and I was hoping to be able to make that work as some kind of a gradual suffocation image, but I can't seem to get the wording quite right. Plus, I'm not sure that this particular blanket problem is universal.

So, I decided that I could try a different notion to bring some cohesiveness, that notion being the personification of the skeleton as the woman. However, I'm not married to that idea, and I debate it endlessly with myself at all strange hours.