American Voyeur

[71degrees]

Withdrawn due to lack of poetry

[tectak]

Sitting in a yellow booth
at an all-night diner,
I feel clean, like the spoon
I use to stir hard sugar
into my coffee

Outside, a cab;
two people exit,
one street side

The man in a gray overcoat
waves limply to a woman,
disappears to my left,
steps pointy, like a compass

The woman poses, almost grainy,
as if another picture will never
be taken of her again

or at least until another
nameless woman is left
by an anonymous man
in a gray overcoat

with only one anonymous
onlooker as proof
she even existed

hi 71,
I have been here.If you really want to workshop this then you need to do something, anything, to make it interesting.

This was what I was left with.

A man got ouf of a cab then a woman got out.
I don't know anything about them
and probably never will.

The end

...you may believe there is something more profound in your posting, and that may be so, but the offer of profundity demands a whole container of complexity in a very real sense...and this is a truism... because without nuance, enigma, intrigue, inventiveness or subtlety there is absolutely nothing to think about. So I don't
Best,
laterally,
tectak

[71degrees]

Okay. With no suggestions, I guess I should withdraw the poem.

Best,
obversely,
71degrees

[ellajam]

Withdrawn due to lack of poetry

ha, you're a little quick on the draw for me. I thought S3 and 4 worked, but I often read a while before I post. Oh, well.

[71degrees]

Withdrawn due to lack of poetry

ha, you're a little quick on the draw for me. I thought S3 and 4 worked, but I often read a while before I post. Oh, well.

Well, thanks for the thought. The poem was inspired by Hopper, but what the heck.

[tectak]

Okay. With no suggestions, I guess I should withdraw the poem.

Best,
obversely,
71degrees

Never withdraw If you withdraw this you have wasted a thought. Poets are always short of thoughts. Do you want it teleporting to miscellaneous for future reference? Just say.
Best,
tectak

[71degrees]

Okay. With no suggestions, I guess I should withdraw the poem.

Best,
obversely,
71degrees

Never withdraw If you withdraw this you have wasted a thought. Poets are always short of thoughts. Do you want it teleporting to miscellaneous for future reference? Just say.
Best,
tectak

No thanks. My "thought" is now being shared on another board.

[tectak]

Okay. With no suggestions, I guess I should withdraw the poem.

Best,
obversely,
71degrees

Never withdraw If you withdraw this you have wasted a thought. Poets are always short of thoughts. Do you want it teleporting to miscellaneous for future reference? Just say.
Best,
tectak

No thanks. My "thought" is now being shared on another board.

AYLI,
Best,
tectak

[crow]

I had some feedback . . . Should I hold onto it? Tectak tends to assume the author's ready to write a solid poem, but needs permission, and permission often takes the form, "fix it!"

As a macro comment, I agree--there's a solid poem here. I'd specify, but I'm not sure you're still frequenting the board. Fwiw, you're not likely to find a more-active board to post to . . . And, far as I can tell, there's not another that'll say, "this is bad." which is a big draw of this'n for me.

[71degrees]

Oh, I'm still here. And thanks, but no need to hang on to your feedback. When a poem is deemed hopeless with not one shred of suggestion, I will pull it. There's no need for that, no matter what the assumption. I have enough publications…I don't need anyone's "permission" to write a poem, either good or bad. What I'm looking for are suggestions/criticisms for improvement.

Sounds like you had one or two. Next time I'll leave things up longer.

[rowens]

Everybody can still see the poem in the second post. And pulling your poem after only one comment makes you seem like a tight-ass pansy. No matter how many publications you have.

[crow]

rowens--that's my favorite thing ever--never though I'd read "you're a tight-ass pussy" on a poetry forum. But there's something in there to chew over . . .

Last night, I was at a karaoke bar south of Fort Worth, Texas, and I paid the KJ ten bucks to let me stay 10 minutes past closing to record a song from a musical I've been writing. I didn't know that others would stay past, too--boyfriends of bartenders and waitresses who were excited to get home, mostly.

So, there I am, not knowing that there's a hostile audience, trying to get a sense for how an unfinished song would sound with good acoustics. And, you won't be shocked to discover, I was roundly jeered.

Maybe you'd be surprised to know that it hurt. I've got an unfinished song from a musical that I aired accidentally to a bunch of guys who didn't want to be there in the first place, and they wanted, very understandably, for the music to stop *immediately*. But there was a little triumph, too, because there were 90 seconds where they quit jeering. And that's the 90 seconds I'll keep.

A comment like, "this sucks," is, in fact, useless. We're oriented to one another here as the drunk boyfriends were to me in the bar. And if they'd managed to shut me up quickly, I'd be saying, never doing that again.

Press on. There's no such thing as a worthless poem, just as there's no such thing as a useless comment. Granted, in theory, someone could say, "that sucks," and keep on browsing, but that's not been my experience here.

I was poised to leave this site, too, for the same kind of emotions, and I would've, too, if there was a better feedback forum out there. But there isn't. So, that said, here's my edit of what was quoted by tectak:

---

(12-19-2013 07:08 AM)71degrees Wrote:
Sitting in a yellow booth
at an all-night diner,
I feel clean, like the spoon
I use to stir hard sugar
into my coffee

Outside, a cab;
two people exit,
one street side

The man in a gray overcoat
waves limply to a woman,
disappears to my left,
steps pointy, like a compass

The woman poses, almost grainy,
as if another picture will never
be taken of her again

or at least until another
nameless woman is left
by an anonymous man
in a gray overcoat

with only one anonymous
onlooker as proof
she even existed
---
Am I really supposed to add all the punctuation for you? Holy shit, man!
If you want evaporation at the end, there's a mark for that: ellipses. It's _._._._ to indicate a trailing off, not three collapsed periods, btw.

What are your colors doing here? Sitting in a yellow booth, I would feel covered in urine, just like I do reading this poem!--just kidding

[milo]

Sometimes poems suck and the best thing to do is delete them. This one did and the author did as well. Good call imo. i am moving this thread to miscellaneous.

[crow]

Oh--cool. I'll quit the edit. 71degrees, send me a pm if you want a not-joke edit

[Truerenigma]

Withdrawn due to lack of poetry

Excellent. Short and succinct. I like the "due" "to" rhyme. I especially like the way you ended it with a smiley face: ballsy and original choice.