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Blue Fuckin' Moon (Free verse) by lastobelus 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.
Up the ladder:
Mirrors
Down the ladder:
bruised butterfly
Votes: (green: user, blue: anonymous)
Arithmetic Mean: 5.75
Posted: March 16, 2003 4:58 PM PST; Last modified: March 16, 2003 4:58 PM PSTWeighted score: 5.089402 Overall Rank: 6259 Comments:
Beginning's okay, middle starts to shimmy a bit, but then pow. good show, could use a re-edit to get the tens though. here's an 8.
Thank you. Please give me more info! Like I said to p&k, this is a "pet poem" for me, such that I'm unable to step outside of it and see where it's broken.
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.
I'm glad you sent me to this one. I remember seeing it a while ago and being tickled. You've got that ee cummings knack for random assocation (even between weird adjectives and their nouns) in your early posts that I can't approximate. I get the sense it was beaten out of you by months of Rancoring, but I wish you had kept some of it, even if hidden, and it should be a little more hidden.
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.
Thanks!
"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. 209 view(s)
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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??