Free verse № 151652
Breath
The stuffy beige is alleviated by the slightly
unbuttoned windows. They let the sweaty
voices of students in, echoing, banging.
The blinds bulge with blinding light, a fly
or two settle here and there:
on a book of Dryden's,
books on Dryden,
books on Dryden's theories,
books on Dryden's hobbies,
laundry lists
and sex life.
Big breaths, bottles lined up like a squadron
about to fire water down the desk bound.
Their wrists are taut from the writing, their
legs part to let air circulate, a lock or two
sticks to the back of their neck. The moment
comes when above a partition eyes catch,
and then shy.
Between the shelves, looking for PQ 4563.Z3
you spy a lone leg straining, further up
a belly rubs against the ledge, elsewhere an arm.
Either side of the book path are creatures
with large desks for legs, rectangle merpeople
undulating with boredom.
4 comments
But anyway. You tell too much and don't say enough - the poem's either surface-shallow or it's not made me curious enough to venture further into it. The beige is stuffy, the windows are slightly unbuttoned, the voices of students are sweaty...so? It reads more like prose than poetry. That isn't a bad thing unless you're aiming for a poetic voice, in which case it is a bad thing.
'Blinding light' = so close to being a Dylan Thomas reference that I'd either change it or follow it up with a tactile reference to him. It just seems unnecessarily derivative as it is. I don't think you need the repetition of 'books on', my preference would be for something like:
books on Dryden,
(hobbies, theories,
laundry lists and sex life)
...or something like that.
Anyhoo, blah blah etc. etc., you can probably guess the rest of the stuff I'd have to say. It wouldn't be particularly interesting, so I'm not going to say it.
The final stanza is ace though.
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