sonawrote
on Esplanade by Wulf
23 Apr 2005, 8:55 PM
I rather loved this....I am not as experienced a writer and enjoyed the format and rhyme... tok me in for a great visual journey, Thanks...
Aren't you, like, Welsh?
This isn't really a country song. Real country music these days is filled with boasts about the singer's anti-intellectualism. Here's one I just heard (in an Old Town Amman shawerma stand, no less!): http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~shuppr/lamusic /pina.htm
A reminise like this needs a little more to grab the attention of somebody who's new to your street.
God, I totally misread this. I thought it was about someone bravely continuing to practice autoerotica in a wheat field even after a bad experience with a puritanical neighbour and their genital shocking taser gun.
Though if you really think about it, that is more or less exactly what you've described in your expository comment.
the sound is killing me again and again
written to a friend who passed like a breath of fresh air through my life at a very difficult period
There's nothing really wrong with this poem except that it should be properly punctuated and doesn't really have anything distinguishing it. Original or striking poems about friends are hard to write. And there are far too many friend-poems on poemranker. If you're bent on doing it, though, here's an interesting place to start:
http://www.slate.com/id/2092680
Or here:
http://www.slate.com/id/3416, http://www.slate.com/id/33215, http://www.slate.com/id/2089046
"breathe" should be "breath".
Sick-making.
I disagree with Dovina.
Drop "and" from the last line.
I thought about p/p when I wrote my villanelle. I .just couldn't get it to work.
Is this zodiac? Or our very own Browne recluse?
Move on to bigger and better things will ya! My inferiority is flaring again. gish.
Deca- dence.
I've seen him, I think
driving that road,
shoe leather soul
Part of me wishes
to walk alongside
talk with agave
cross the Majave
with a dark ghostly guide
A rephrasing of a common theme, and not a very good one.
i like the imagery of moth wings beating against a window.
I agree. I'm Impressed.
Listen, this is how pathos works: exaggeration kills it. Big giant concepts kill it. Feel desolate? describing the world as a vast empire of desolation will not make us relate to your sense desolation. We can look around and see for ourselves that the world is not a stygian yard of nightmares; everything is not dead; nothingness does not have claws (how can nothingness have claws? nothingness is nothingness. Re-read Sartre and try to actually understand him this time instead of inanely using some of the words he uses). So when you describe the entire universe as somehow for some reason having as it's sole purpose the mirroring of your particular bad mood or bout of depression WE DON'T BUY IT.
Little details create pathos. Describe the one little mournful detail in a generally indifferent world of sunny days and rainy days that occur at random; celebrations, wars, funerals, weddings, parties & columbus high school massacres that all occur at random with absolutely no regard for the psychological state of one teenager (I truly truly hope you are still a teenager) who's obsessed with darkness and paints his fingernails black. That one little detail that's personal is what will capture our attention, make us relate to your sense of desolation.
You are not goth. Fear of Garbage is goth -- good goth. The difference between you and her is neatly captured in the difference in your nicknames.
Yours: there's only one Prince of Darkness, or Prince of the Void. You are not him. You're a depressed teenager. A bazillion other depressed teenagers have already used your nickname in a bazillion dungeons & dragons game. It's so utterly non-original that you'd have seemed quirkier and more alienated if you nicknamed yourself Bob.
Hers: Fear of Garbage, abbreviated to F.o.G. It's clever, and unique. It refers to the character of her writing on multiple levels -- both in its full & acronym form. And it manages to be at least as instantly recognizeable as goth as "Prince of Void" but without seeming pathetically absurd.
If you intended this pome as a description of the last level of Diablo III then forgive me, I suppose it works reasonably well in that role. Though there's no mention of those things that eat corpses and then spit them at you. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the actual world that we actually live in. Not even metaphorically.