My mind's fly (explict)

[richthehat]

Woken this morning by an insistent fly persistently diving into my hung over disgraced face. 
Not that I did anything out of place the night before,
but as an aging man this sort of activity is poor. Surely there must be more than Pissed up over indulgent consumption of a poison. 
What fun. 
But back to the fly. 
He was right
Get up get out of your pit wash away the washed up feelings of a writer and do some work. 
What followed was this.

Follow the signs let life unwind. Don't live inside lines perceived through eyes that for all their elegant design are blind. 
Time is a concept constructed by minds. 
I Thought as I spread Nutella over my hand

With only perception of previous experience the possibility for prosperity becomes diminished inherently.          Down generations of reincarnations following in the footsteps of  a     humanity that's boundaries are determined by a falsification of reality.

Rightly?  Wrongly? Or just differently?
   Choices matter little in a life of infinity. 
The hairline of the present is where you'll live happily.

What more can there be other than the occurring of the moment? and then puff gone into past, why do we insist on the moment to last?

And what about the moment that's coming next week I'll think about that moment now because this moment's bleak. Of course the moment next week it comes and it goes and in ignorant bliss the universe flows and you missed it all because you weren't even there. You were wrapped up in memories of needless despair. Prepared for the worst or hoping for the best while the moment itself lay dormant at rest.

It's beauty missed.

By elegantly designed eyes.

Live in the moment like that f***ing fly.

[Magpie]

Hi, in some ways I think you're very brave in writing a poem like this. I am always slightly suspicious of poems that come across as preachy and tell me the best way to be living. I wonder what qualifies the writer to be able to hand out advice in such a manner.
I know that I should not presume that the narrator of the poem is also the poet who wrote it, but with a poem like yours it is very hard not to think that. The fly scenario may not have happened but I still get the feeling that it's you giving me the advice. A poem that tells a story and implies certain bits of advice would be a whole lot easier to digest.
I'm not saying that your advice is rubbish, you may be Zen as fuck and have all the answers to lifes great mysteries but if you spout wisdom and it sounds preachy people will react and shut down, it is human nature to do so.
You could have went somewhere by using the fly in a story and it did appear as if that what was going to happen, but we lost the fly after the first stanza although he gets a brief mention in the last line.
After your first stanza there just seem to be a lot of statements, some which sound vaguely familiar and some of which are a bit bamboozling.

Time is a concept - is so familiar to almost everyone who has been anywhere near a buddhist or university or guardian newspaper.

"& alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade" - from Howl by Allen Ginsberg

I'm not trying to be a bastard here I'm just trying to say that there are other ways of being able to say what you are trying to say without almost ultimately saying,

"The past is forgotten, the future is unknown, today is a gift and that's why they call it the present" — Bang! Bang!

Tell me more about the fly. House flies live for only about a fortnight or so. A whole life in two weeks - there's got to be something in there somehow. I had pet rats once and they lived for three years, a whole life of crazy adolescence, 20's through to 40's, middle aged, old age and then gone all in three years, it was mind blowing to watch, it would be a possible scenario that I would use if I were wanting to tell people to live in the moment, it would be much more effective than just telling them to live in the moment.

Probably went on a bit too much here for novice but I wanted to make a point,

hope I wasn't too preachy  

Mark

[Erthona]

I'm still waiting for the "explict" whatever that is. Could you possibly explicate the meaning of "explict"?  

A lot of these lines are written somewhat awkwardly and the lineation is pretty much all over the place(just an example):

"Woken this morning by an insistent fly persistently diving into my hung over disgraced face."

"Awoke this morning by an insistent fly
persistently diving at my hung-over
and disgraced face."


1. woken is the equivalent of waked. So it doesn't really work well here.
2. If a fly were to dive into one's face, it would mean he broke the skin barrier and I don't think that is what is meant.
3. As hungover and disgraced both refer to the face they should be balanced by "and", not written as though one were part of the other, not unless the disgraced was hungover or the hungover was disgraced.

This unfortunately is not an isolated incident, and similar occurrences pepper the poem. So the goal here I think is to go back and try to improve on the sentence structure as well as the lineation, that is to put it to the benefit of the poem.

A poem of course does not have to be written in formal verse, but there needs to be some rhythmic underpinning to distinguish it from prose, at the moment I sense nothing of the type.

This piece reads more as rhetoric than as poetry. Mark called it preachy, I would call it sermanistic, except there is no such word, so I am forced to stay with rhetoric

This form of passing on supposed "wisdom knowledge" is not new and was often used in religious writings during the early stages of the colonization of the United States. So on one hand it is certainly a valid tradition, while on the other it has been so over used you will probably find very few who will respond to it, simply due to the form of presentation. So that might be something to consider.


Best,


dale

[richthehat]

I'm glad I provoked such a lengthy response. Thank you.
I agree with you
There is no message here and I felt that and tried to use the humour of the fly and Nutella for a reason to force these words that when rolled of the tongue appear to have meaning.
But of course being zen as fuck I realise they don't.
Will try to improve as always
Thanks again

---

Thanks dale 
I am currently travelling and writing on a phone so the clunkyness of the writing is down to that coupled with my laziness. I will a dress all of your points in this piece and further pieces. Especially as the last thing I want is to preach. I'm really just noting my findings in this mess of a world we live in. rhetoric makes up a huge part of life and I am happy to force nice sounding words together to create a thought. 
Thanks for the criticism
I will try to e
xpress myself in a less preachy fashion in future

[albinododobird]

I agree with Erthona that you should probably divide the poem into more lines. Also, I think some of your rhymes sound a little bit forced. For instance, when you rhyme "before" with "poor" in lines 2 and 3, "poor" doesn't seem like the best word you could use to describe your "sort of activity." Another example of a rhyme that I don't think works very well comes at the end, when you rhyme "week" with "bleak." The rhythm there seems a bit unsteady as a result of your working in the rhyme.

On the other hand, a lot of your rhymes or almost-rhymes work really well. Line 12 has a great rhythm and the words "prosperity" and "inherently," though not rhyming, have similar vowel sounds and stresses.

I'd also add that you can probably do more showing and less telling. Very little of this poem is actually about the fly. Most of it is a series of moralistic ruminations. You could communicate your message in a more compelling way by focusing the poem on the fly.

[Magpie]

I'm glad I provoked such a lengthy response. Thank you.
I agree with you
There is no message here and I felt that and tried to use the humour of the fly and Nutella for a reason to force these words that when rolled of the tongue appear to have meaning.
But of course being zen as fuck I realise they don't.
Will try to improve as always
Thanks again

[Image: https://googledrive.com/host/0B3tixtS7tc...elcome.JPG]