Beauty

[addy]

One of my favorites from you Jack. Aside from being beautiful, it's a poem that's uniquely voices who you are, and that in itself is a precious thing to give to readers. Good job with this.

As a child I was obsessed with depravity.
Read every article I could
on handgun wielding sons of Sam
and hippies, bored with bongs and sex,
making piñatas from pregnant women.
My internal library was soaked
with blood and entrails, young ladies
screaming in the night,
child snatchers, angry cops. it's a little odd to end with angry cops? not heavy enough to contrast well with "endless dark", but that's just imo. So far the lines are excellent
The endless dark enshrouded me.
having grown and suffered
since then, how about "having since grown and suffered"?my personal trek
through the landscapes of hell
hardly even begun, I've learned to love
the simple things. Red sour sauce
on a ball of battered chicken, the way
a lamppost impregnates a puddle,
the perfect, compact loveliness
of a face or a thigh or an arse. These last few lines are gorgeous.
All this beauty and I - ill, depressive,
angry, scared - must learn to snatch
these images, store them like nuts
so when I die my internal library I'd prefer it if you can do something to highlight the "internal library" line, use it in a more prominent place so the callback is more apparent, just a suggestion to take or leave
will shimmer, blossom, then burst into light. I've felt this, but of course you articulated it much, much better than I could