My Heat

[Caleb Murdock]

My Heat


You are sleeping; I like to let you sleep.
You are my boy of paradise
who finds my bed each Friday night;
and I am the man who never was young.

I live my life for nights with boys like you,
yet what has any boy to give?
You verge from one excitement to the next
when not sharing your rhythmic charms

or dozing when the act is done.
And when the animal has left
remains the intellectual disgrace
who has never felt the surge of his own sex.

I am a modern man, all projection;
the new breed of electronic mover,
fingers on keys and thoughts at heaven's teat;
you are my impatient feet, my fever.

You make me complete – that awful cliché!
You save me from the lonely ache.
The moist, supple root holds aloft the limb
that is dry and tired and about to break.

So run, my twenty-something tom,
more of a boy than I was at eight;
be what I can be only in my dreams:
my animal, my sap, my innocence, my heat.


==========

I originally had "dash" for "verge".  I'm not sure I'm using "verge" correctly.

In response to crits, I changed "tiger" to "tom" in the final stanza, and I altered the capitalization.

[aschueler]

P

My Heat


You are sleeping; I like to let you sleep.  I like this contemplative line
You are my boy of paradise
Who finds my bed each Friday night;
And I am the man who never was young.  Interesting.... Not sure that you totally tied this in

I live my life for nights with boys like you,
Yet what has any boy to give?
You verge from one excitement to the next
When not sharing your rhythmic charms

Or dozing when the act is done.
And when the animal has left  sentence fragment 
Remains the intellectual disgrace
Who has never felt the surge of his own sex.

I am a modern man, all projection;  hard shift in topic, doesn't fit quite right here
The new breed of electronic mover,
Fingers on keys and thoughts at heaven's teat;  ironic tone i assume, which just works
You are my impatient feet, my fever.  I am pushing critique of mild, but assuming you are drawing some contrast here it misses.

You make me complete – that awful cliché!
You save me from the lonely ache.
The moist, supple root holds aloft the limb
That is dry and tired and about to break.   Again its mild but roots are confusing me

So run, my twenty-something tiger,  Personally I hate tiger here.  Cliched to the point of pain.
More of a boy than I was at eight;
Be what I can be only in my dreams:
My animal, my sap, my innocence, my heat. 


==========

I originally had "dash" for "verge".  I'm not sure I'm using "verge" correctly.

This is a very good start, but some things to consider.

Its all quatrains, but no clear consistent rhyme.  It doesnt have to rhyme, but usually thats the reason for structure.  I searched all over for the word verge.  Did I miss it?

The word tiger brings to mind cougar, which is something I think you don't want.  Sap and roots are nice but incompletely drawn out.

Keep going!

Mike

[Achebe]

You would probably need to fix the following:

1. Quartrains without rhyme or meter. If you're going for free verse, mix it up. Otherwise, it sounds like an off-key song
2. odd expressions: 'thoughts at heaven's teat' (thoughts vs suckling - what's the link?)  and 'remains the intellectual disgrace' - shouldn't that be followed by an 'of one'? etc.


not much to add, therefore, to mike's post.

On the other hand, the subject is interesting and sensitively treated.

[Caleb Murdock]

Ascheuler and Achebe, thank you for your feedback.

I've had this poem critiqued by a few people before, and one of the reasons I posted it here was to see if people would fully understand it (I don't usually hide my meaning away, but this one is slightly obscure).  I'm hoping that more people will add comments, so I won't respond to what you said now -- except to say that there is no fragment in the third stanza, but there is an inversion of subject and verb.

Regarding "tiger", I agree it is too much of a cliche.  Sometimes a cliche'd word becomes embedded in the language so thoroughly that it becomes a proper word in its own right, but that hasn't happened in this case.  I've settled on "tom".

[justcloudy]

Interesting read. There were bits I liked a lot, and the theme was respectfully and tastefully treated, but the whole thing seemed a bit uneven to me, I think because, as mentioned above, of the quatrains lacking rhythm or rhyme-- I kept wanting to find a rhythm as I read. A restructure would help you get your point across with less distraction.

Maybe just personal preference but I think the capital letters at the beginning of every line aren't doing much for you, neither is the sporadically-absent punctuation.

Just a thought: "I am the man who was never young" might serve you well as the title instead of where it is.

-jc

[Caleb Murdock]

Thank you for your comments, JC.

Since the rhyme and meter have been mentioned before, I want to talk about them a little.

I made a decision a long time ago not to let rhyme determine my word selection to more than a small degree, so I go for internal rhymes and off-rhymes and, when I can get them, perfect rhymes.  In this case, the second stanza has no rhymes (I tried to rhyme "give", but couldn't), and the fifth stanza has a perfect rhyme.  The others are off-rhymes or internal rhymes.  I would like to have been more consistent, but then the rhymes would have been in control of the message.  I don't worry too much about the expectations of the reader.  A good reader tries to read with an open mind.  (I'm not speaking about you here.  This being a forum, I expect people to read critically.)

Leanne turned me on to a poem by Oodgeroo Noonuccal which emphasizes the rhyme at the expense of the meter -- that's another way to go, but not one that I've taken so far.

As far as the meter is concerned, I am pushing the envelope in this poem.  I waver back and forth between tetrameter and pentameter.  This will seem odd to poets, who will notice such inconsistencies, but not to the general reader (I think).  The poem is, overall, iambic, and that is what is most important to me.  In my view, the poem is rhythmical.

As long as I'm writing, I might as well mention that stanza 3, line 3 has an inversion:  [the intellectual disgrace] <> [remains].  Inversions are seen by many writers as old-fashioned, but I see them as a delightful tool that I'm not willing to give up.  That line would sound much more plodding (to me, at least) without the inversion.

I only recently started to switch from all-caps at the beginnings of lines to caps at the beginnings of sentences only, and I think you are right that this poem would benefit from that.

If you have specific suggestions for the punctuation, please let me know.

Finally, since your criticisms were mostly technical, I take it that you understood the meaning of the poem, and that is very important to me.  I take responsibility for the technical heresies, but I always want to be understood.  Thank you again!