i tried to write poetry for her eyes, but only drank whisky and doodled the cigarettes i smoked she wasn't impressed i tried to stuff nature into lines to compare the stampede of her beauty but i only drank whisky and lost my thoughts on a diesel wind she wasn't impressed i tried to fathom love and loss with an ink stain the size of her sigh but i only drank whisky and subscribed to a perfect numb she wasn't impressed she tried to erect everything she owned on the back seat of her car and i drank whisky as her desperate pyramids went up and up, as high as my cigarette smoke, impressive then gone
your poetry is amazing. absolutely magnificent, and your imagery is so original it's stunning. keep writing man, this stuff is golden.
okay, so that was the easiest way to take care of that initially. your line breaks drive me crazy but your words blow my mind. it's like you're playing "poetic" hard-to-get and i love it. so, i put in temporary, suggestive line breaks. for the most part, i either took out words that could be tossed or just moved them around. i don't think i added anything (other than the critical marks). i loved the first stanza and i saw where you were breaking it and i could see why, but i didn't think it needed to be enjambed. however, again that's only a suggestion. i thought having the "traditional" line "but i drank whiskey and ..." show up throughout for the repetition. i also like the excessive use of "i" and sometimes "my" and anything that refers back to the speaker for the sense of stammering, mumbling, "trying." you can't say you're going to compare something unless you having something to compare it to, otherwise you're just being vague, which is, apparently, almost like doing this other thing... the love and loss line just rings cliche at first pass, if anything the line itself has a good cadence. i get the ink stain and i like it but the line just sounds awkward. everytime i read it i keep reading "the size of her thigh" and get thrown out of the mood you've put me in. also, before i mention the last stanza, i changed the white space scheme you were using. instead of returning twice after the end of each stanza before "she wasn't impressed." i thought it made more sense for it to come up quicker and the following stanza to come up slower. if that makes sense. now, the final stanza.:toetap05: i get it, and i almost want to like it, but, i dunno. first, if you want me to accept your meta-boner-phor, you have to tell me how i "erect everything that own." if i'm a million different people reading this, "everything i own" is different times a million. if i'm a farmer with a flock of sheep i imagine taking all my sheep and stacking them up into an "erection." maybe i'm overanalyzing it, and probably am, but i don't think "erect everything that own" makes sense to me syntactically. also in this stanza we lose the traditonal "but i only drank whiskey and ..." line which carries all the desperation and hopelessness to the end of the poem, except that it's now reworded differently and we're left with bouncing pyramids, oh, and the cigarettes pop up again as we drift away with the smoke going, "hmm." so, if you disregard entirely my penchant for hypercriticism and over-analyzation, i thoroughly enjoyed reading this. when i read a good poem that i am willing to sit down and pick apart just to get to know it better always makes me happy.
I really enjoyed it. It has that lazy, jaded feel that works really for a poem of this sort. I do agree that few things could be tightened, which Horace explained pretty well. So, since we're picking this apart in the interest of constructive criticism: Personally I like the line about the back seat, since i choose not to take it as a phallic metaphor, but as an attempt to pack your life up and keep moving. Which is what she would do, since she wasnt impressed. She has a lot of walls up and this is her way of running away and protecting herself. Therefore, I didnt like the pyramids. A little too obvious, a little too Egyptian for the tone of this poem. I'd have preferred if you'd just said boobs, if thats what you meant. I think directness would have more punch here, since it is a poem with that sort of feel. Same with erections. Also, if she wasn't impressed, how come the sex? And if she's just doing it as whatev, how come she's soaring?
