A death

FinsburyParkCarrots

Hear me: Pete's red jackpot popping face,
spilling yellow coins of smoky light,
enriches beer reflections on the beige
pub tiles. Pete holds our space with flicks of ash
and Bushmill's breath. He's Elbows. Shoulders. Coughs
lung-rattling (like whalebone shores when black
ford waters clog the shallows of our ears
mixing with the fears of village drowning
down in highest sudden tidings) spew and shoal
(like useless poachings from a poison bay).
How now they sound at us echoings of songs
made in our youthful pouting mirrors. Shit.
It's shit. Here in this pub some glorify
as culture - still maintained in the fields
of peasantry's Idyll - Pete coughs and falls,
slowly, like the dropping glade where bees
don't settle, where no Yeats arises, goes
to find. The jackpot spills. The coins lay grey.

MeddleDeal

that is really one dark poem. did you just write it out like that? I could sense the hurt as I read it. Very sad and tragic.

thanks for sharing.

FinsburyParkCarrots

MeddleDeal wrote:

that is really one dark poem. did you just write it out like that? I could sense the hurt as I read it. Very sad and tragic.

thanks for sharing.

Yes. Just improvised, and edited a bit. Thanks.

DopeBeastie

Hear me: Pete's red jackpot popping face,
spilling yellow coins of smoky light,
enriches beer reflections on the beige
pub tiles. Pete holds our space with flicks of ash
and Bushmill's breath. He's Elbows. Shoulders. Coughs
lung-rattling (like whalebone shores when black
ford waters clog the shallows of our ears
mixing with the fears of village drowning
down in highest sudden tidings) spew and shoal
(like useless poachings from a poison bay).
How now they sound at us echoings of songs
made in our youthful pouting mirrors. Shit.
It's shit. Here in this pub some glorify
as culture - still maintained in the fields
of peasantry's Idyll - Pete coughs and falls,
slowly, like the dropping glade where bees
don't settle, where no Yeats arises, goes
to find. The jackpot spills. The coins lay grey.[/quote]


Many a sad scene in the bars and cafe's.


It's very cacauphonous, Richard. The words just scrape against each other. Looks to be a-purpose?

FinsburyParkCarrots

PastaNazi wrote:

Looks to be a-purpose?

That depends on what each individual reader thinks purpose in art to be.

It's about a death in a west of Ireland pub, and it does deliberately use anti-romantic language to challenge the lyricism of Yeats's "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" (alluded to in the last lines).

ISN

I found the first few lines a bit jarring, so I didn't read it, but seeing as you said you mentioned Yeats, I decided to read it, and I found it to be terribly beautiful.......

FinsburyParkCarrots

ISN wrote:

I found the first few lines a bit jarring, so I didn't read it, but seeing as you said you mentioned Yeats, I decided to read it, and I found it to be terribly beautiful.......

Well, I like to jar it up occasionally.

ISN

I usually like a few jars too....heheheeheh

(guess what, someone in the bottle shop tonight wanted the cheapest bottle of whisky for 'massage purposes'......wow!!!!)

FinsburyParkCarrots

ISN wrote:

I usually like a few jars too....heheheeheh

(guess what, someone in the bottle shop tonight wanted the cheapest bottle of whisky for 'massage purposes'......wow!!!!)

A whisky massage? I gave myself a poteen massage last week, but it was my tonsils I was massaging.

ISN

.....(I've never tasted poteen......it sounds so exotic!!!!)

FinsburyParkCarrots

My dad brought it back from Ireland, smuggled in a Jameson's bottle. It's as clear as water. It crystalises in your tum overnight, so if you drink coffee in the morning, you're drunk again.

ISN

wow.....that's so cool......is it actually illegal.....I guess it is......it sounds so romantic.......beautiful Irish poets and musicians getting wasted on home brew and creating magic!!!!

FinsburyParkCarrots

ISN wrote:

wow.....that's so cool......is it actually illegal.....I guess it is......it sounds so romantic.......beautiful Irish poets and musicians getting wasted on home brew and creating magic!!!!

It's good stuff anyway. There were little black flakes in it. I think that was gunpowder.

grooveamatic

Astounding work Fins. I can smell and taste this poem.

I think you lifted it from the back of my brain.

Guttural, visceral, and incredibly real.

Your poems always astound because your words seem so carefully chosen; this one excels especially because it maintains careful word choice while shocking with imagery (olfactory even). You blast us.

Here is the sad part of humans; a churning. A burning despair.

I'm printing this one out.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Thanks, Groove. I suppose one thing I deliberately did with the form was to cluster similes. You can't mix metaphors in poetry but you can heap simile upon simile: I read Richmond Lattimore's translation of Homer's Iliad three years ago and I saw how pretty extensive similes would be densely packed in a torrent of information at key, dramatic points in the narrative (such as when the Achaean and Trojan armies would be preparing for battle). I've always wanted to try that device in my own meagre efforts. So, I thought if I did that and used parentheses and staccato syntax it would create that simultaneous feeling of a body seizing up and yet, in the closely following similes of shoalings and poison tides, giving way (to put it politely).

EvilToasterElf

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

Hear me: Pete's red jackpot popping face,
spilling yellow coins of smoky light,
enriches beer reflections on the beige
pub tiles. Pete holds our space with flicks of ash
and Bushmill's breath. He's Elbows. Shoulders. Coughs
lung-rattling (like whalebone shores when black
ford waters clog the shallows of our ears
mixing with the fears of village drowning
down in highest sudden tidings) spew and shoal
(like useless poachings from a poison bay).
How now they sound at us echoings of songs
made in our youthful pouting mirrors. Shit.
It's shit. Here in this pub some glorify
as culture - still maintained in the fields
of peasantry's Idyll - Pete coughs and falls,
slowly, like the dropping glade where bees
don't settle, where no Yeats arises, goes
to find. The jackpot spills. The coins lay grey.

I don't think you need to nominalize spill in the second line, and I think the first set of parentheses can be reworded a bit, the simile stacking works very affectively, but that one image seems to meander, and I'm personally a little confused by it. Also, I think "Shit. It's Shit." should have it's own line, it seems like a perfect break, or halfway point in the poem. And it would have an effect like cramming all the similes into a funnel, and then reading how they drifted into a new container, the play on Yeats, by the end of the poem.

But these are minor things, and since there's a bit of mimetics from a source I'm not familiar with I may be off base, still, stellar work. I love the line's "flicks of ash and bushmill's breath," and "the dropping glade where bees don't settle".

FinsburyParkCarrots

EvilToasterElf wrote:

I don't think you need to nominalize spill in the second line, and I think the first set of parentheses can be reworded a bit, the simile stacking works very affectively, but that one image seems to meander, and I'm personally a little confused by it. Also, I think "Shit. It's Shit." should have it's own line, it seems like a perfect break, or halfway point in the poem. And it would have an effect like cramming all the similes into a funnel, and then reading how they drifted into a new container, the play on Yeats, by the end of the poem.

But these are minor things, and since there's a bit of mimetics from a source I'm not familiar with I may be off base, still, stellar work. I love the line's "flicks of ash and bushmill's breath," and "the dropping glade where bees don't settle".

"pilling" isn't nominalised. It's syntactically a present participle verb referring to Pete's face (metaphorised as a jackpot machine shedding coins of light). Read the first couple of lines as a sentence and the word will take its correct place semantically and syntactically.

Hear me: Pete's red jackpot popping face, spilling yellow coins of smoky light, enriches beer reflections on the beige pub tiles.

I'm actually quite pleased it jars.


There are no breaks in the lines because it's blank verse. I want that jam packed effect. A breathless, tightchested, gas-gurgling, explosive effect of sudden death as it actually happens. I'm not going to give people the form they'd feel better with, aesthetically or even physically, with this one.

EvilToasterElf

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

"pilling" isn't nominalised. It's syntactically a present participle verb referring to Pete's face (metaphorised as a jackpot machine shedding coins of light). Read the first couple of lines as a sentence and the word will take its correct place semantically and syntactically.

Hear me: Pete's red jackpot popping face, spilling yellow coins of smoky light, enriches beer reflections on the beige pub tiles.

I'm actually quite pleased it jars.


There are no breaks in the lines because it's blank verse. I want that jam packed effect. A breathless, tightchested, gas-gurgling, explosive effect of sudden death as it actually happens. I'm not going to give people the form they'd feel better with, aesthetically or even physically, with this one.

I suppose Pete's red jackpot popping face, spills yellow coins of smoky light, enriching beer reflections on the beige pub tiles. Amounts to the same thing anyway, just a personal preference I suppose. And I know you react like a hornet everytime I use the word "reader" so I suppose from now on I should just say "me." But there's still a difference between jarring and confusing, I still have no idea what that first parentheses means.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Well, I was going to include a footnote to explain it. It's geographically particular. But I thought fuck it, I'll post it on the Pit. I never share my stuff here anymore, but I made an exception for once.

Bed first. I'll get to it after a bit.

FinsburyParkCarrots

EvilToasterElf wrote:

I suppose Pete's red jackpot popping face, spills yellow coins of smoky light, enriching beer reflections on the beige pub tiles. Amounts to the same thing anyway, just a personal preference I suppose.

But that would fuck the pentameter up.

EvilToasterElf

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

But that would fuck the pentameter up.

Well la-dee-da, let me get on my gamaphone and hoist a grand putand to the dutchess of merriweather

...I don't even know where I am right now

FinsburyParkCarrots

It made Charlie Parker smile. He died laughing, at a comic juggling velcro bricks on TV.

olderman

what a way to go, eh?