(no subject)

[ursula]

I've been attempting to write poetry for some contest that involves the words peace and justice. This sort of effort is depressing and ultimately doomed.

things I learned growing up

I. everything can be broken

all you need to powder anthrax is a bag of glass marbles and a washing machine
says my father the engineer, fitting lizard tiles side-by-side in the bathroom
my father the conscientious objector says one time in the barracks he got a funny feeling
and a shell hit and his friends died right where he’d been standing
my mother shies from packages in train stations remembering
bombed-out storefronts in seventies London

II. everyone is broken

acid squeaks between his teeth and afterwards
he walks into every room and looks behind the mirrors for someone watching
she lets him fuck her up the ass ‘cause she doesn’t want him closer
he put a plastic bag over his head and waited to die

III. so what

after a shower the green tiles are like a jungle
her husband grills mushrooms for dinner
I was born anyway and
fuck it all maybe I love you

Comments

[nobu.livejournal.com]

i like it. the end has a strange feel to it though. sort of like that one poem about a guy sitting in a hammock where at the end after all this description he says "I have wasted my life"
i am not sure the nonsequiter works... and yet, i am not sure it doesn't work...
hmm
oh, i like the tie in of imagery of the war and then jungle later...

Re:

[ursula]

How much of III do you think is a non sequitur? The last line? The whole section?

Also, how many characters do you think the poem has?

Re:

[loveschak.livejournal.com]

It has 868 characters, incuding 91 instaces of the letter E.

Re:

[ursula]

I think you mean instances, with two 'n's, unless your particular brand of native English speaking has ramifications I hadn't dreamed of.

Re:

[loveschak.livejournal.com]

Alas, one of my characters has left the stage.

Re:

[nobu.livejournal.com]

i felt five characters... mother, father, the people of the second part, and the speaker "I"...
the last two lines of III are the slightly off part...
i feel the first two lines refer back to the father placing tiles in the bathroom etc...

Re:

[ursula]

So that makes "you" a sixth character? Hmmm. Do you think this would be better as a really fucked-up love poem, or with another line or two obviously referring to parts I and II?

Re:

[sildra.livejournal.com]

I read four characters--the mother and father are everyone spoken of in the third person, and "I" and "you" are two others.

Re:

[ursula]

Do you also think the last two lines are a non sequitur?

Re:

[sildra.livejournal.com]

Only the very last line, I think.

Re:

[nobu.livejournal.com]

i suppose the second to last line can refer to the anal sex... but it isn't really a leap people might make easily, so if that is what you meant, and there are only the mother and father... then you should tie that closer together perhaps...
i can see it being a fucked up love poem if you take the speaker as using the mother and father as an example in order to talk him/herself out of loving the subject of the last line... then the "anyway" and last line make sense...

Re:

[ursula]

I meant the second-to-last line as "neither of the narrator's parents died before the narrator could be conceived." The assumption that the narrator knows what sort of sex its parents were having is not integral to the poem . . . In fact sildra's interpretation hadn't occurred to me at all, though I don't mind reading the poem that way.