Words

[dukealien]

I have read too many words,
so many that I can no longer see them.
They blur together, inadequate.
They stand naked in the storm,
puckered flesh no defense
against the wall of lead and steel.  First stanza:  good images, satisfactory free verse rhythm, and three characters:  speaker,  the fleshly words which have (somehow without enhancing their meaning) become melded, and the shitstorm of military dimensions (which is what?)

Words stirred together
like so many battered pigments,
‘til mixed to the ancient smear,
the old blood hue that we all know
brown and unremarkable,  emphasizing the mixing again rather than the meaning it should sharpen (right there on the next line)
never to be as sharp
as the shrapnel that
cuts across the landscape
from east to west,
and back again.  as in S1, contrasting weakness of the mix with sharpness of the... what?  Reality?   Opposition?  What opposes words?

The old man's scythe
drones back and forth,  Dynamite image, but I want to know what it personifies.
back and forth,
‘til all the words,
those useless words  OK, a test for words - not true or meaningful, just useful (or not)
are cut to pieces,
crushed under the cheap concrete rubble,
dazed, broken, forgotten,
lying weeping on the floor.  so the words have sentiments and regrets about... being useless?




An oldish one. Feel free to pull it apart and make it better, if possible.

(In Intensive, and without reading prior critiques...)

The problem here, as I see it (and I'm a little drunk and possibly not much use myself at the moment) is that the thing which interferes with the speaker's words, while metaphorically and well described, is not actually identified.  The author may have had something in mind - a lover's harsh rejection, the resort to violence when addressed with compelling rhetoric and willingness to listen (appropriate to the present September of 2025), or just failure of diplomacy against war.  But the essence of a metaphor is that its referent will be understood (and then better understood in light of the verse).  I may be missing it, but we are never told what the warlike, death-like mulcher and destroyer of words is.

Now it may be this is the point:  the melt and mashing of words is a howling meaninglessness indistinguishable from a confused clash by night.  But I want a hint, even to that.  Don't call it "The Defeat of Words," it doesn't have to be that blatant, but something.  Just because words are defeated doesn't mean yours must be, reflecting on that collapse.

There may be a hint of what to hang it all on in the call-backs to usefulness (and uselessness).  What is the use of words, that they fail in it?  You don't have to give us hope, only a suggestion about what brought the Tower down.  Communication, its failure, perhaps.

Hope that helps, or at least doesn't add to the disharmonium.