//Prefaces and preambles//
January fading in silence
Fading in fanfare
Half-thawed frost
A sad-slow-lowly-silent-sound.
This time tomorrow I’ll have shaken off these words
Embraced a beer
Back to a new
old
huddled
prostrate,
puking
cowardly world
Heard from the second stall,
Looking for a balance of
sweet smelling sheets and sweat-stains
between
the
desperate
heartbeats.
The prefaces to weekends
Bottles,
Innocence,
beyond reach,
beyond hope
The preambles to the weeks,
With my dreams inbetween:
A cottage in the countryside,
suckling tonic and anise.
Fairs and festivals in the evenings on the grange
And my aching waking reality:
A degree at the bottom of a bottle,
To pay for car-troubles, and collared shirts
But for now it’s a tango
three sheets to the wind
doing the dance of The Diapered Nihilists.
Either way between the desperate heartbeats
it’s ultimately a long slow sad lonely
selfish
show.
My university has a 4-1-4 system which roughly means I can do whatever I like for the month of January. For the past month we've spent our days skiing or on short jaunts, watching films, making meals, working on the side and generally lazing about and now it's coming to an end. I've realized that I probably won't get another opportunity like this, perhaps in my lifetime while so youthful, or at least for quite some time. This is a contemplation on those Halcyon Days on the university dole.
Forgive the redundancies, thought maybe you gents could advise me there, hadn't yet figure out where to eliminate them so I just jotted them down. Seems a bit long-winded too, but then January's a long month so I'm not sure. Have at it.
2 comments:
you lose me a bit with the "puking cowardly world / Heard from the second stall." those lines don't really seem to take the poem in any direction; they seem inconsistent with the the poem's nonspecificity. if you reintroduce them later it would keep with the poem's cyclical motion, although if you do i'd like to know more about this outside world's influence on your winter wonderland rather than just have it be a static presence. static is a word i'd use to describe this poem overall, which certainly is appropriate given its subject.
i think the only thing it really lacks is a cohesive sense of "where." the when, the who, the why are all very clear, but it's like it takes place in a black hole of space: conceptually it's cogent, but on the page it feels sloppy. maybe take the second stall stanza, put it at the beginning and play with that to see if a clear scene develops that works through to the end. the more i read this poem the more i like it, and the more i think it just needs to be tied together a little tighter to make the jump from "good" to "excellent." i dig.
Love the aural aspect of the piece. I also actually like the length. Anything shorter might move too quickly, what with the single-word lines in the first few stanzas (and yes, January does tend to drag on). Word choice itself is excellent as well, as always.
I'm not a fan of the contradictions ("January fading in silence / Fading in fanfare...", "Back to a new / old...")-- they're just something I feel has become a kind of technical cliche, if that's possible.
To what redundancies are you referring?
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