08-10-2011, 03:32 PM
This comment is on the revised version.
I like how this poem somehow manages to be dark and sinister yet also charming. The narrator is completely psychotic, and no doubt a hair's breadth away from hacking up his former sweetheart into a million bloody pieces, but he's so pathetic that I warmed to him nonetheless.
These lines were perfect, and gave me the silent pleasure such poetry does when everything falls into place: the breaks, the images, all of it:
"I chew tinfoil to create interference,
the electrochemical reaction combines
with the mercury in my fillings,
so that I become like cigarette smoke
drifting insubstantial beneath the window
of the roadside motel you visit
every Thursday."
I like how this poem somehow manages to be dark and sinister yet also charming. The narrator is completely psychotic, and no doubt a hair's breadth away from hacking up his former sweetheart into a million bloody pieces, but he's so pathetic that I warmed to him nonetheless.
These lines were perfect, and gave me the silent pleasure such poetry does when everything falls into place: the breaks, the images, all of it:
"I chew tinfoil to create interference,
the electrochemical reaction combines
with the mercury in my fillings,
so that I become like cigarette smoke
drifting insubstantial beneath the window
of the roadside motel you visit
every Thursday."
"We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges." - Gene Wolfe