The Difference - Edit 1

[RiverNotch]

The Difference

I. Solitude

A bachelor
stands outside his house
alone, discovering 
cool breezes, sunny leaves
and birdsong comma at the end?
no one to say such gentle joys
are unmanly.

i lol at the fact that as i consider this, i'm listening to grieg's peer gynt suites. the gentle joys here feel, for me, a little too gentle -- at the very least remove the too-overt "alone". or perhaps make them even gentler: instead of removing "alone", remove the rather cliched images in the two lines succeeding it, further enhancing the harsh, unjustified nature of that last term, "unmanly".

II. Loneliness

That bachelor discovering
no house-keys in his pocket.

i don't quite like the structure of this sentence. "discovering / no house-keys in his pocket" doesn't sound quite as definitive as it needs to be -- i don't have house-keys in my pocket, too, and for all we know his might just be under the welcome-rug. also, i don't quite like the structure of the entire poem, mostly in terms of the numbers. there doesn't seem to be much of a categorical or chronological distinction between the two sections: in fact, the whole works best as a unified joke, each title well integrated into the rest of the text (instead of the rather awkward narration of the earlier draft, I think a simple colon should suffice), and the fragmentation developed by the numbering excised.