A Dead Man’s Poem

[Oden Prufrock]

0

Dead Man’s Poem

Sound’s ephemerality:
sweet graveside singing.
Deceased, stone vitality
reverberates the ringing.
A choir of crying crickets
click in the dark thicket
raining tears of pitches
washing away the grey picture.
Black and white youth:
decomposing sinew.

A silent, grateful ode
lost in the cracking of bones.

Worms churn buttery bodies,
erupting tendrils squirm,
young ones ask, "Where's Wally?"
red and white turned to dirt.
Bodies stay baby-still
to the knelling of the bells,
widows weep, sons still
the unspoken word: a spell:
necromantic static
as deep as a well.

A silent, grateful ode
lost in the cracking of bones.

CRRRRRR-
ackalackadacking
flutey skeleton,
“I never touched a celibate.
Life, I was content with it.”
Xylophone bones,
Jamaican vibes,
“We all go alone,
even Bob Marley died.”
Fiesta la vida!
Un poco loco!
“For you to think,
I would still want to blink…”
Coconut milk dribs,
empty satisfied ribs,
“I speak through the dust,
eternity is death.”

As a parody of what a poem is supposed to be, it is too long. So it’s just a bad poem, like a middle schooler’s concept of what a meaningful poem ought to be. 

“Young ones ask “where’s Wally”
is no more meaningful in context than
“young ones sit astride the polka horse”

There isn’t a single image that stands out. Actually, there are no images.

There’s nothing here to critique, but in borrowing from an earlier crit about a similar sort of poem a few years ago, the author might want to develop a single image and work on that.

No.

“Not a single image”
- “Deceased, stone vitality”
- “Erupting tendrils squirm”
- “Widows weep, sons still”
- “Xylophone bones”

Critique is not meant to be one-sided and there are clearly positive aspects in the poem. The sort of people who can’t understand literary technique and draw abstract concepts from language don’t belong here, they belong in middle school.