Free verse № 44460
Blue Fuckin' Moon
Then he's got his god-red little footsies
hanging off the dock smelling out the little fishies
staring at the moon.
Stone-black caught in silhouette, go go go
amber glint, we are
swimming 'round a bottle, laughing
TV commercial Faulkner doom,
pass the pass the back 'n' forth ass,
the peach-girl throat caught in sudden beauty--
ok, laugh the random fractal beauty of it all:
there it is, the sweet liquor moon, same one
200-odd nights a year, 4 billion years running.
Crystalline, her sweet pie lips in big O,
falls off the dock and disturbs the great white swath
into a zillion tiny ripples and I laugh a strong liquor gurgle
into the dying throat of the world.
Crystaline floats away on her back
and the moon shadow goes still again--
then Louie
waves his "god my damn feet hurt"
tootsies in the water, playing a little game
with the blue
fuckin' moon.
6 comments
Response to it read out loud is pretty good, all that syncopation, but it failed in print (on the street at least) and I always wondered why because for me it's one of my favourites. I'd love to make it work, if I had a clue how. Problem is it works so well for me inside my own head that I can't step outside and see where it's not working for the non-me reader.
What jumps out to you as obvious influences, apart from the overall tone being charles B.-ish? I had always felt all the images were fairly original??
I know it fails, from having watched hundreds of people read it and not buy it (way back in my street poet days) but I don't know how and where.
ha, ha you read at slams a lot so I know you heard the last lines in your head like I read'm.
Still, that quality is poetic (ie, what's going on OUT THERE) and a bag of chips. An image like "god-red little footsies" would be welcome in a more structured poem. That's the kind of association that's pulp-making.
The start, too, with "Then" is very strong. The change to 'we' in the second, um, sentence is off-putting, along with 'go go go amber glint' which I can't make refer to anything satisfying for me.
"TV commercial Faulkner doom"? I hope you know now to use concepts like that in a meaningful and more-or-less grammatically correct way.
And then it devolves into similar stream-of-consciousness Joycean crap for a while. I've known one person who liked to read Joyce and I suspect she was lying.
Then it comes back. After 'ok, laugh' I'm with you again. In manuscript I see the s-of-c lines broken up a little more and italicized. You could pull them off that way. Maybe it should all be broken up more. At least into stanzas. I'm big on stanzas.
Crystalline has 2 ls, then 1. Then it just needs to say about 3 more things than it does. At least, to be pulpwood-style. I'm fine with things that just paint a scene, like this. But the good ones that seem to do that, when you break them open, you find more inside. There's some of that here but a little short of enough. Is that it? Very Beat and cummings, which is its downfall. Hide that a little better and you're ace.
"go, go, go amber glint" is referring to the advertising product shot version of the liquor they're drinking. If I introduce the bottle first, then would that make sense?
Faulkner's not tossed in by accident, the feel of this (at least in my head when I wrote it) is derived from parts of the sound and the fury (which has influenced me more than any other single thing I've ever read). So I was thinking about having the narrator imagine Caddy skinny-dipping with them, and quentin sitting by himself on the dock watching resentfully.
I can work up the part that you say loses you more I think -- I just want to evoke flashes of images of passing the bottle of liquor back and forth, the girls gamboling in the water & over everything the full moon. And I wanted the narrator to come across as pretty fucking drunk.
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