Beyond

[rowens]

One more bleak spring.
One more of power and agony.
A burning death in every momentary pleasure;
Botched pleasure makes a man immortal.

One more, heated desert of bright color,
And I can smash the cup to the ground;
And lick it up that way.
Gulp after gulps of dirt-and-lace passion.
With the soft desserts between the long-
Lasting meals, with fine-choking pleasures.

I eat to fulfillment, in a full body
Blackened by an Earth scorched by electric light,
Local, electrical, pattern recognized message-signs,
And puny lights, that outshine and glow the body.

I darken my face with emotion:
"We are not expected to feel this way…
We're not to say, and do, like that
Any more…" It's too late, we weren't born
For that excrement brown that delights
You when you think of farms…

When you see the faded, plain yellow envelopes
With the creases that like-dirt traces on the neck
Of a body that contains a message, from the symbols
Of old youth: - "We're not old youth.-

"We're fresh as the light of the new cast on screen;
That flashes with its electric light that leaves no ghosts on our eyelids.
We've found a way of getting past that…"
You paint your face like I do, in that light;
Like a black slave, whose pain is obsolete too.
Darkened with emotion, not of cruel comedy,
But tragedy.

One more Dionysian spring;
And I'll throw the cup to the ground,
And lap it up thickstyle like a cow chewing its cud.
"We're not meant to feel that way anymore…"

No, you're not allowed to feel this way any more:
So you throw nothing to the ground,
You play nothing on the air,
You send nothing through the waves,
You leave nothing but exhaust smoke,
From an exhausted life that burns like cold air on a bald head.

One more excrement brown spring,
And I'll throw blackface to the ground,
In the noon of my emotions;
Where pale skinned vampires eat but don't swallow

The soul of the music,
Foisted on them by the villainy of the clowns that love too much.
"Too much love is a crime. A damn shame…"
I put those words in your mouth,
Because you're still choking on exhausted smoke.
Excuses, frozen offerings where you keep corpses in two freezers in your basement,
Ghosts that have no bodies, bodies that have no ghosts…

Spirits that have no souls,
Love that has no heat,
Talent that has no movement,
Dances that have no life.

One more, not for the road;
The broken flesh of the crippled host;
Not for the parasites that need the oil,
The blood, the weapons, and the drugs.
But for the sun, that melts the heart,
The trees that calm the air,
With their own humble dances.

One more dance, with drunken longing,
Before I put on the black of race tracks, tar, and racist pride;
The Capital clear black of post humanity, no country, no race,
No emotion; no lasting promises.

Guilt free, stricken mood swings, no hope,
Just tears. No books to fling; but just rest the chaliced head,
The bored sex, the crippled spring, the exhaust winter,
Eagle eyed jealousy, knife chosen envy, bleeding rooftops
Of meaningless dropping birds, and lonely rain!
More lonely than a kiss, on a head that keeps talking on the phone;
A fallen gravestone in a background you never knew.

When I walk within one more house I don't want
And then another, and another;
Put the whole thing down to one more morning, one more spring, -
One more winter, one more year.

[Philatone]

hey rowens

the biggest thing that stands out to me is that i'm having trouble connecting with some of the images put forward. some examples:

And I can smash the cup to the ground;
And lick it up that way.

here, I'm not sure what you are licking up exactly; semantically, i imagine it is whatever is in the cup, but the syntax (sentence itself) suggests that the speaker is licking up the smashed cup

I darken my face with emotion:

this escaped me as well in terms of knowing exactly what it means

Where pale skinned vampires eat but don't swallow

The soul of the music,
Foisted on them by the villainy of the clowns that love too much.

again, i'm bogged down keeping track of everything. the metaphor (or what I take to be one) flows into yet another metaphor of "clowns"---this is getting heavy. I think simpler, shorter lines and some trimming could make this piece more accessible for me; i apologize if i may be missing the point

[billy]

i'd like to see something more solid to help me see the bigger picture of what
is being shown. i've had three or four reads and so far all i remember are the
two excrements , a few electric lights and a couple of pleasures. the poem doesn't
grab me in any way and say "this is the thing"
the last stanza had me feeling that there has to be more than this but the earlier parts;
i can't get a handle on.

thanks for the read.

[rowens]

I think the problem you have understanding is that you like poetry and read and write poetry. I don't know about the kinds of lives you live. Some of the poems I've made, like this one, are dithyrambic shouts to those people here where I am that let the countryside be destroyed in favor of large parking lots for factories, and mini malls that no one can afford to open stores in, while they're watching tv and playing video games and playing online. The kids around here are never seen playing outside. And you'll go to bed with a beautiful forest across the road from your house, and wake up with a bunch of plowing vehicles and stumps and trucks parked there: just as sudden as that.---What I mean to say is that writing poems and enjoying nature and the spirit immanent in such things here is like putting on blackface and singing old blues songs in front of a town full of gangsta rappers. And there are towns like this all over America. There are the Conservative Christian types, but then there's the redneck or the gangsta thug or dark metal or punk type people that are into styles and fads, but nothing much else but being high and pissed off all the time; and all of them I talk to tell me the same thing: money corrupts, but there's nothing else to do, so what the fuck. So there are no bookstores, mangled fields and forests, malls and shopping centres full of empty stores and empty parking lot space, and a big Mecca called SuperWalmart where everyone in town goes at least once a week. Our libraries are in such decay that you have to pay to rent books. We don't have record stores either. So there's nothing to do but go to work, get drunk and high, watch tv, and feel bitter. And when all your friends become drug addicts and spend all their time lying on couches in houses where their dealers live, and the only time they come to you is when they're asking for a hundred, two hundred dollars or so, the "pale skinned vampires" isn't a metaphor.---It might not be what a poem should be, it's a blues song, to ecstatically sing through the frustration and loss. It's part of a series that I plan to put together with other poems, some that are finished some that aren't, that puts it in a more suitable context. But I put it here to see how well it lives or falls on its own. Among you, real readers of poetry.

---

Love and spirit are intense multilayered things. I love someone, I love my friends, my family, I love the spirit of the countryside. But rearrange the landscape, rearrange the chemicals in the body, evolve new ways of perceiving the world and society: and love, persona, spirit, poetry; all becomes less efficient, and who am I to want to burden the hardcore money-makers, strung out drug addicts, and low wage factory workers with my childish enthusiasm over what to do on the fall equinox or how I feel less loved when a woman tells me she's only giving head to other guys so she can afford drugs and it's nothing personal?---So I have to live my time, and write poems about text messages and beyond (and by beyond I don't mean this poem). So this is a fighting through poem. To express the merging, and that experience of merging in and of itself.

[rowens]

Writing in metaphors gets tricky. I was just reading what Leanne wrote in the "Songs" category, and can easily feel foolish now if someone else reads that, then what I wrote above. Taking my "it's a blues song" literally. It's a tragicomedy, how's that?

[Leanne]

I hadn't read this before now, it does sound like I was taking you to task doesn't it? Sorry!

I'm doing a close reading now for some critique, it will take a while.

---

Lots to like here, but I'd say there's just as much that could be chopped out -- nobody much likes being preached at, and that's the feeling I got from a couple of these stanzas. I think you need to expect that your readers can "get" things on their own, without it being spelled out in too obvious a fashion.

One more bleak spring.
One more of power and agony. -- does the repetition of "one more" really serve a purpose? It seems to me that "of power and agony" (without the full stop on the first line) would do nicely
A burning death in every momentary pleasure;
Botched pleasure makes a man immortal. -- pleasure isn't really a strong enough word to use twice

One more, heated desert of bright color, -- this repetition, however, echoes the first line of the preceding stanza well
And I can smash the cup to the ground; -- probably don't need "and" here
And lick it up that way. -- this is not bad, but you might consider "and lick the liquid up that way"
Gulp after gulps of dirt-and-lace passion. -- gulp after gulp, no s or it doesn't work
With the soft desserts between the long- -- "the" could go
Lasting meals, with fine-choking pleasures.

I eat to fulfillment, in a full body
Blackened by an Earth scorched by electric light, -- "an" is unnecessary... with the capital E, it's clear there's only one Earth
Local, electrical, pattern recognized message-signs,
And puny lights, that outshine and glow the body. -- not sure of "glow" as a verb here, but it's not awful

I darken my face with emotion:
"We are not expected to feel this way…
We're not to say, and do, like that
Any more…" It's too late, we weren't born
For that excrement brown that delights
You when you think of farms… -- this stanza, while not badly written, doesn't seem to add anything in the way of showing; it's very tell-y and obvious, while I prefer my poetry to be subtle... but that's my preference, after all

When you see the faded, plain yellow envelopes
With the creases that like-dirt traces on the neck -- is "that" supposed to be here?
Of a body that contains a message, from the symbols
Of old youth: - "We're not old youth.- -- the dashes seems weird

"We're fresh as the light of the new cast on screen;
That flashes with its electric light that leaves no ghosts on our eyelids. -- electric light is repetitive
We've found a way of getting past that…"
You paint your face like I do, in that light;
Like a black slave, whose pain is obsolete too.
Darkened with emotion, not of cruel comedy,
But tragedy.

One more Dionysian spring;
And I'll throw the cup to the ground, -- nice revisiting of S2
And lap it up thickstyle like a cow chewing its cud. -- you could remove "like" to make this stronger as a metaphor with a comma after "thickstyle"
"We're not meant to feel that way anymore…"

No, you're not allowed to feel this way any more: -- this is awkward and tell-y when stated straight out, and it's really implied by the rest of the poem
So you throw nothing to the ground,
You play nothing on the air,
You send nothing through the waves,
You leave nothing but exhaust smoke,
From an exhausted life that burns like cold air on a bald head. -- nice!

One more excrement brown spring, -- have you thought about "excremental" instead of "excrement brown"?
And I'll throw blackface to the ground,
In the noon of my emotions;
Where pale skinned vampires eat but don't swallow

The soul of the music,
Foisted on them by the villainy of the clowns that love too much.
"Too much love is a crime. A damn shame…"
I put those words in your mouth,
Because you're still choking on exhausted smoke.-- repetitive
Excuses, frozen offerings where you keep corpses in two freezers in your basement,
Ghosts that have no bodies, bodies that have no ghosts…

Spirits that have no souls,
Love that has no heat,
Talent that has no movement,
Dances that have no life.

One more, not for the road;
The broken flesh of the crippled host;
Not for the parasites that need the oil,
The blood, the weapons, and the drugs.
But for the sun, that melts the heart,
The trees that calm the air,
With their own humble dances. -- this is a good stanza, lots of images that give the reader credit for being able to unravel meaning him/herself

One more dance, with drunken longing,
Before I put on the black of race tracks, tar, and racist pride;
The Capital clear black of post humanity, no country, no race,
No emotion; no lasting promises. -- this stanza is really heavy-handed

Guilt free, stricken mood swings, no hope,
Just tears. No books to fling; but just rest the chaliced head,
The bored sex, the crippled spring, the exhaust winter,
Eagle eyed jealousy, knife chosen envy, bleeding rooftops
Of meaningless dropping birds, and lonely rain!
More lonely than a kiss, on a head that keeps talking on the phone;
A fallen gravestone in a background you never knew. -- more excellent imagery, I like this stanza

When I walk within one more house I don't want
And then another, and another;
Put the whole thing down to one more morning, one more spring, -
One more winter, one more year. -- good ending

[rowens]

It's been a long time since I wrote poetry with any strict form. I've written a lot of prose, maybe that comes through here, and elsewhere.

---

I wrote that before I saw your reply. Hold on.

[Leanne]

oh crap, sorry, I've just realised you posted this in the miscellaneous forum and I've done a fairly serious critique -- feel free to tell me to sod off.

[rowens]

I do like to say that I was being somewhat of a prick in some of my poems. Like this one. Preachy, yes. Another is that I'm talking to someone specific. Which can make it quite tedious unless the reader gets off on hearing someone get publicly scorned, which isn't likely in some cases. The pleasure not being strong enough, ain't that the truth, in this case, that's why it's botched. I know I'm defending a lot of what I write. But I take all of what everyone tells me into consideration. I do annoying stuff on purpose, like even stuff that annoys me, like saying "dirt-like", and "gulp after gulps". Why, because there's a bit of guilt in here too. And I need to come off somewhat like a preachy prick. I don't ever think that I'm trying to pull one over on the reader, only giving the reader the sense that I'm struggling to make sense of things myself. These poems are far from perfect as they are, and I'm working harder on some other poems that I hope to share. But I do like some of these imperfect ones because they helped me through some terrible times.

---

"like-dirt". See, how it annoys me. I meant to say "like-dirt". As the poem says.

---

Something very powerful for me is the way poor, uneducated, southern black people used to talk. Theyd add words where they dont belong, add an 's' to words like i did with gulp, and the double triple negatives. And had so much attitude and music to it. People call it sass or jive, but whatever you say about it, I dont think it sounds uneducated at all. Just another kind of education.

[billy]

oh crap, sorry, I've just realised you posted this in the miscellaneous forum and I've done a fairly serious critique -- feel free to tell me to sod off.

actually you're allowed to leave any comments you wish as long as it's on topic (about the poem) unless the poet asks for specific type of feedback or none at all. read the rules for this forum (you wrote them )