Sadness - edit

[dukealien]

Sadness


I looked across my street and saw
my neighbor’s car with one side scraped
it’s not a beauty of a car
and he’s no prize, my neighbor, but
to see that scrape just made me sad.
Am I a crazy man or bad
to sympathize so helplessly
or, pride aside, the opposite?

I look across my street and see
my neighbor’s car with one side scraped
it’s not a beauty of a car
and he’s no prize, my neighbor, but
to see that scrape just makes me sad.
Am I a crazy man or bad
to sympathize so helplessly
or, pride aside, the opposite?

It might be fun to rewrite this using words of no more than two syllables?

[milo]

Sadness


I look across my street and see
my neighbor’s car with one side scraped
it’s not a beauty of a car
and he’s no prize, my neighbor, but
to see that scrape just makes me sad.
Am I a crazy man or bad
to sympathize so helplessly
or, pride aside, the opposite?

It might be fun to rewrite this using words of no more than two syllables?

The present tense makes it seem awkward to me.

We know it is not occurring in real time - you wrote about it . . .

[dukealien]

Sadness


I look across my street and see
my neighbor’s car with one side scraped
it’s not a beauty of a car
and he’s no prize, my neighbor, but
to see that scrape just makes me sad.
Am I a crazy man or bad
to sympathize so helplessly
or, pride aside, the opposite?

It might be fun to rewrite this using words of no more than two syllables?

The present tense makes it seem awkward to me.

We know it is not occurring in real time - you wrote about it . . .

Good point.  I'll see how it looks in past tense...

though what happens is, every time I look at that car, I think this.  And this one time, I wrote (or, anyway, mentally composed) it, so there it hangs, frozen in time, all molecular motion suspended in the present tense.   

[milo]

There could be something interesting in the inexorability of a future tense
But I will never know until you write it.

[dukealien]

edit1;

Sadness


I looked across my street and saw
my neighbor’s car with one side scraped
it’s not a beauty of a car
and he’s no prize, my neighbor, but
to see that scrape just made me sad.
Am I a crazy man or bad
to sympathize so helplessly
or, pride aside, the opposite?

---

Thanks for constructive criticism.  I took me a while to come around to the idea of past tense because (to me) present tense implied it might be a recurring event (see, react).  But that's me; if the recurring idea doesn't come across, one-time will do.  That's why we look for crit!

[Knot]

.
Hi Duke,
better for the revision.
I do stumble on ‘helplessly’ and, to a lesser degree, ‘pride’.

Wondered about

I looked across my street and saw
my neighbor’s car with one side scraped
no beauty she and he’s no prize,
my neighbor, but to see that scrape
just made me sad. Is it crazy
or bad to sympathize like this
so helplessly or, pride aside,
the opposite?

Then had a go at your two-syllable challenge.

Again I see my neighbor’s car
across the street, the one side scraped.
No beauty she and he’s no prize,
my neighbor, but to see that scratch
just makes me sad. Am I crazy,
or just bad, to feel like this, this
lost, or, pride aside, the reverse?


Best, Knot





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