I spit in your coffee this morning

[rbl]

I. you hustled your way into my days and nights, my hallway,
my poems.

we ate yellow flowers along the way.

we followed our breath and the shore.

II. you wake up beside me and whisper you're beautiful.

In my head you're a sniper named Hans.

III. you recite a poem where you give me saucer eyes
looking up at you.

you guide me to my knees in your kitchen.

you make the bees swarm outside.

IV. the screaming starts at 4:00 am and I try to contact you
telepathically. I've tried breaking windows.

I'm keeping your smell.

[billy]

what to say, what to say.
i think some of the lines are great. specially the sniper one.
on first glance i thought...why all the roman numerals, but they sort of work well in
stopping it being a run of the mill list. it gives the insanity some sort of order.
i have no nits, just found it unusual and disturbingly funny. though i'm sure i shouldn't
it's originality alone shows if you have the confidence of getting some constructive feedback
that you should be posting in the serious or mild crit forums.

i just read it a few more times and improves as a decent read should.
thanks for posting it.

billy

[Erthona]

I like the title!

[rbl]

Thanks for your feedback guys! I do appreciate what you have to say!http://pigpenpoetry.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

[Philatone]

hello rbl!

just some thoughts:
-the numerals attract attention, but I do like the divisions they create. I can feel time passing between
-great lines woven into here; the bees one is wonderful
-my favorite section is IV because the screaming disrupted me as well as the poem; such a dark thing in a poem that, while not exactly bright (what with the sniper, the hustling, etc), seemed rather mellow to say the least. not sure how I feel about the last line, however.

[grannyjill]

I've been backwards and forwards over this several times - and I've decided that it charts the rise and fall of a love affair...ending in tragedy. There are some nice 'bits' in it...like 'sniper Hans' and the swarming bees....which stand out from the crowd.

I wonder if you could think of a a different word instead of 'saucer' -since that seems close to a cliche for me (I think because it features in a children's story - The TinderBox I think it was called) but that is just a minor comment.

[Wildcard]

I feel kind of dumb to ask this, but I didn't get the 'sniper named Hans' part. I see that many others like it but for the life of me I can't figure out how it fits

[grannyjill]

I liked it because it was so bizarre - not because I understood it. When you are in bed with someone in an intimate embrace, who knows what passes through your mind? Tho' I can't say I have ever got close to thinking anything like that.....more like 'I wonder whether I ought to change the water in the goldfish bowl tomorrow'

[abu nuwas]

I have looked at the comments of others. I see that there has been doubt about the Roman numerals. So-- my take is simply that people use punctuation in all sorts of ways, or not at all, to give some colour of flavour to what they write, and thus Roman must be legitimate, and having been used ,it does achieve something, but it is unsayable, except that it serves to sever one piece from another, thus creating pauses of a special type. I salute this --it is original.

Then we have been exercised about the sniper Hans. I choose to see him either as a real man, the lover, whose name chances to be Hans, who constantly disturbs in one way or another---OR it is more of a dream than fantasy, and somewhere, he is compared with a bona fide German sniper of WW11. There is no way of knowing; and it perhaps does not matter overly. A real German sniper might merge into the lover because of his unpredictable attacks. Alternate readings may produce a kind of synthesis.

It may be a simple statement of what occurred, but my inclination is to see it as dream-like, and I think I have said enough. I liked it, and the fact that it encouraged me to read it over several times, speaks for it. But then, I am a lousy critic...

[Erthona]

Ed's right...he is a lousy critic However I will jump on his dream idea and re-characterize it as a reverie, and I can agree it does have that feel to it.
If the speaker is female, it helps some with the Hans problem, although to me it has overtones a of watching to many 007 movies. But I think a lot of people have those experiences that in psychology is called disassociation, where people we have known forever, briefly seem like total strangers. The often referenced "deja vu" is a milder experience of this.
Although I have done so myself in the past, I have come to believe that using Roman numerals in such a short piece is a bit ostentatious, especially when something like a line break, or at most a short line in the middle of the page will suffice to act as a divider. In regards to outlining, Roman numerals are used for the second largest division in a generally large work, usually only under the division of a chapter. Personally I see them in this piece as a bit disruptive, because I think most people will think they are odd given their general usage, and so the reader begins thinking about why there are Roman numerals there (as though there is a hidden reason of which the reader is unaware), rather than focusing on the poem. Why this is problematic to me is the really only justifiable reason for using them is simply, "because I wanted to". To me a whim is not sufficient justification to support disruption. I also think it is right to honor the past to a certain degree by acknowledging generally accepted usage. I think for the last century we have rebelled in large portions just to rebel, and an error we made is to see such things as this as rules rather than guidelines.

Just my take,

Dale