The best...and worst of EvilToasterElf
EvilToasterElf
Posts: 1,119
Alright, I'm trying to crank out a manuscript and get a full book of poetry published. So I'm going to throw stuff on here as I update and tweak it, I want nit-picking up the ying-yang. We'll start with one of my newer pieces, and I guess work backward from there. And for those of you who haven't seen them, I hope you enjoy.
oh by the way, the working title for the book is: Fog In the Suburbs
ETE
Country Real Estate
After pacing his house for sixty years,
his body became those hardwood floors,
that groan under the pressure of footsteps.
He paced for fifteen of those years
before bending into the slope of his cane,
slowly falling into the black vinyl
of his wheelchair.
The months between visits whittle his bones
like the oak crossbeams,
blessed by the appetite of termites.
His joints hollowed into
an instrument of complaint.
The lives within his dusty rolodex
continued to gather speed
when the music of liver pills and calcium drinks,
was silenced by a wind
over the floorboards.
A couple from Connecticut came two weeks later
to buy his house. The years pass quietly
as a divorced man loses touch with his children
and paces his own path,
into the dark, warped wood.
oh by the way, the working title for the book is: Fog In the Suburbs
ETE
Country Real Estate
After pacing his house for sixty years,
his body became those hardwood floors,
that groan under the pressure of footsteps.
He paced for fifteen of those years
before bending into the slope of his cane,
slowly falling into the black vinyl
of his wheelchair.
The months between visits whittle his bones
like the oak crossbeams,
blessed by the appetite of termites.
His joints hollowed into
an instrument of complaint.
The lives within his dusty rolodex
continued to gather speed
when the music of liver pills and calcium drinks,
was silenced by a wind
over the floorboards.
A couple from Connecticut came two weeks later
to buy his house. The years pass quietly
as a divorced man loses touch with his children
and paces his own path,
into the dark, warped wood.
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
Youre getting it togetherthen?
A whisper and a chill
adv2005
"Why do I bother?"
The 11th Commandment.
"Whatever"
PETITION TO STOP THE BAN OF SMOKING IN BARS IN THE UNITED STATES....Anyone?
I'm aiming for about 60 poems I think, I'm hoping when I move to Japan and sever the ties so to speak I can really focus on getting it done, it's drips and drabs right now, I'm too comfortable at home, it's a kind of opiate for aspiration.
I feel as though comfort is the best zone to write in.It relaxes you and settles your mind.You really need a focal point.But thats just for me.
You should come see my play's reading in Trenton in Nov.:)
Just wishful thinking....I like having an intelligent audience:)
A whisper and a chill
adv2005
"Why do I bother?"
The 11th Commandment.
"Whatever"
PETITION TO STOP THE BAN OF SMOKING IN BARS IN THE UNITED STATES....Anyone?
Chance
In Trabzon the streets bleed into the Black Sea,
which isn’t black, more the color of a vast bruise
below the flesh of the horizon.
It is the color of every small city,
the color of used cars and used clothes.
Families live in the revolving door
of generations, spilling into the same
jobs, the same marriages, the same
dreams as their parents.
Thousands of seagulls drift upwards
with the fireworks that accompany
a wedding reception.
Their wings flicker like snow
suspended in the distance;
their squawks become white noise
against the moonlit screen of clouds.
We play Turkish monopoly on a rooftop,
the hat pays rent to the battleship,
and I look into the face of a girl
whose name translates to waterfall,
when the sounds of seagulls bursts
into a wave of Arabic song.
I follow the sounds of a wrinkled voice,
beseeching me to praise the creator of all things.
The call to prayer comes in stereo,
the desert God’s dirge bounces
from the mountains and surrounds me
for a time, before it fades
into the watery bruise of the sea;
black now under the half moon,
which lolls in the night sky,
a picture on the chalkboard
smudged by an absent minded teacher.
Thinking of old classrooms my gaze wanders
to the windows, to the sky, to the water;
and I see a train of lights along the coast.
The moisture rising from the water turns
the lines of streetlights and houselights
into a procession of flickering torches.
The landing strip for an angry mob,
at the climax of an old horror movie.
Coming for the monster who thinks
there is poetry in daily struggle.
The hat lands on a square
and my friend translates my monopoly directions
on the back of a card that reads:
Chance
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
Thankyou, that would be much appreciated
The joy of accidental life
Cigar smoke clings to my sprawled hair,
and blue pack mules carry
the luggage under my eyes,
squeezed closer to my nose
by the vice of my two hands.
I sit down at this glass table
and stare at my shaking knees.
My socks plant in the hard wood,
white cacti in the empty desert,
thirsty for that summer storm
that folds the horizon
and scatters the timid vultures.
I can’t look at the swollen belly,
of the 16 year old who wielded
destiny like a toy in her fist,
because her hunger to see the world
is a plate fit for two.
Her jeans became elastic bands,
as belly rings became a bulge.
The mirror became a place of memory,
and denial. The pictures of smiles,
the tight fitting clothes:
those years were all packed
away in boxes,
because her own closet
made her cry.
Maternity was not fit for
this mona lisa.
Thankyou for the huge compliment fins, but I don't need the Nobel, I'll be perfectly satisfied with the national book award. Or maybe a Guggenheim fellowship.
I wish I could come up with a proper comparison to your own talents, but let's just say I'd be happy to be the runner up watching you atop any podium.
http://www.jimihendrix.com/media/19700903.ram
After pacing his house for sixty years,
his body became those hardwood floors,
that groan under the pressure of footsteps.
[Good image]
The last fifteen of those years
he bends into the slope of his cane,
slowly falling into the black vinyl
of his wheelchair.
[I changed a little. See what you think]
The months between visits [what visits] whittle his bones
like the oak crossbeams,
blessed by the appetite of termites.
[Good image. Is the smaller time reference suppose to speed up the poem?]
His joints hollowed into
an instrument of complaint.
[Nice image but it says what was just said. It doesn't reinforce - more like redundant.]
The lives within his dusty rolodex
continued to gather speed
[not sure what this means]
when the music of liver pills and calcium drinks,
was silenced by a wind
over the floorboards.
[Is this an empty house, now?]
A couple from Connecticut came two weeks later
to buy his house. [The K in weeks really stops the poem. After a few readings I see the time references getting smaller in scope, but the k is like a jolt.]
The years pass quietly
as a divorced man loses touch with his children
and paces his own path,
into the dark, warped wood.
[Who is this?]
I see two points of this poem the time and the man. The man is very interesting to me, and if you decide to keep all of the time references in the poem then you would need to explore a particular time [day] for the man. By the way, once that man leaves the house the last time, for me the poem ends. It seems rushed at the end, and all of a sudden people are introduced and they are not as interesting. How does the man leave the house? Really, he is a very interesting character, and there is so much life in him within the space of that house that he has known so many years. I didn't see the man creaking like floorboards creaking, which is good, because that is an overused metaphor. Does this man interest you?
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
which isn’t black, more the color of a vast bruise
below the flesh of the horizon.
It is the color of every small city,
the color of used cars and used clothes.
Families live in the revolving door
of generations, spilling into the same
jobs, the same marriages, the same
dreams as their parents.
Thousands of seagulls drift upwards
with the fireworks that accompany
a wedding reception.
Their wings flicker like snow
suspended in the distance;
their squawks become white noise
against the moonlit screen of clouds.
We play Turkish monopoly on a rooftop,
the hat pays rent to the battleship,
and I look into the face of a girl
whose name translates to waterfall,
when the sounds of seagulls bursts
into a wave of Arabic song.
I follow the sounds of a wrinkled voice,
beseeching me to praise the creator of all things.
The call to prayer comes in stereo,
the desert God’s dirge bounces
from the mountains and surrounds me
for a time, before it fades
into the watery bruise of the sea;
black now under the half moon,
which lolls in the night sky,
a picture on the chalkboard
smudged by an absent minded teacher.
Thinking of old classrooms my gaze wanders
to the windows, to the sky, to the water;
and I see a train of lights along the coast.
The moisture rising from the water turns
the lines of streetlights and houselights
into a procession of flickering torches.
The landing strip for an angry mob,
at the climax of an old horror movie.
Coming for the monster who thinks
there is poetry in daily struggle.
The hat lands on a square
and my friend translates my monopoly directions
on the back of a card that reads:
Chance
I like this poem. The life comes right off the page. This flows very well, and the stanzas connect. The images are clear.
You open the poem with a negative image "bruise" and it seems to color the next image of generations/rituals. The author makes a judgement on rituals through this image of the bruise. However, the rituals in the rest of the poem (monopoly, birds, praying) do not seem to be colored by the bruise, and seem very positive. There's comfort in these rituals. Or do you want them to be colored by the bruise, also? The teacher metaphor lost me, even though I see how you used it to connect stanzas. I don't see the classroom in the image following the mention of classrooms. The monster/mob/poet image is very good. It seems that the author is interested in what is going on here. Were you?
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
No qualification is necessary at all, and it's good to have some broad assertions, it means you're feeling something missing rather than thinking about small grammar points and such. I am not entirely sure, what you mean, but I will say I can't remember ever reading a single poem, and know I was staring at something phenomenal, however, when I read an entire book of some of my favorite poets, I know I am reading something great, because the poems reinforce each other. The feelings behind the characters strengthen. I think that is what I am trying to create. Thankyou though, it's been a while since I've had much encouragement for improvement, and I need a little kickstart every once and a while.
Awesome! Thankyou so much for this. Some of these things are so simple, but once you've read you're own poem so many times, you fill in the tiny gaps yourself without reading that they were missing.
As far as the other questions, I wanted to jump into the life of an old lonely man, he doesn't have a name, he can be any old, lonely man, who begins to replace the comfort of people who don't have time for him anymore, with the comfort of a place, which creaks, and ages, and in a way dies as he does. but stays on to watch the same thing happen to its next occupant. The purpose of the end of the poem is to emphasize the the most important part of the poem was not the man, but the setting. Whether it works or not of course is the real question. You don't think it does, so I'm going to have to think about it again.
Her happiness inflicts a sort of insanity,
but it still draws me, a runaway
coming home with empty pockets.
Her smile is a timeline,
a year for every enamel.
When we speak, each phrase is a vault,
that stores the things we cannot say,
every glance, the sum of a recurring
dream we called our marriage.
Where her hand touched my chest,
fabric rusts through my sternum
like a frost beaten muffler,
before I tear off my copper tie
and slam it into the bar.
I order three shots of Jack,
to chase the oxidized tie chips,
and I see them in crude-oil whiskey,
sinking to the bottom of my
stomach. I shake my head
to eliminate the aftertaste,
and the pictures in my mind.
Leaving room in that dark attic to wonder
if we are more human when ideas
string together in Christmas lights,
or when the blown fuse box of thought
fills that crawlspace with memories,
and a blank smile.
I stumble back to the reception,
and stare at the bride’s table, that rectangle,
filled with romantic thoughts.
She looks perfect up there,
her sun-streaked hair
coils onto her shoulders.
A white dress wraps her frame.
She could crack the equator with her heel.
I stand up with a shaking wine glass,
she glances at me with her green eyes
and tiny crystal bells chime all
around me.
My dark space fills as I stare down
at the suited multitude shouting, “Toast!”
i liked your poems. i personally didn't quite understand(feel) the last paragraph of the first poem.
i am looking forward to reading more of your poems!
Well thankyou, it's called best and worst, becuause their will be a little of both, but sometimes people like the poems I hate the most, or vice-versa.
It seems the last stanza of country real estate needs work still. But the point of the poem is not the man, it's the house, hence the title. And the last stanza is supposed to show that although so much of this old man is attached to the house, another man can come in and submit to the same cycle. Also the second man comes in for the part of his life that we missed from the first character, young and married with kids, yet still succumbs to the same fate inside that country house.
A middle-aged man walks
a fluorescent street in Amsterdam,
high on hash, and purple haze.
He stops at the door of a leggy blonde
pacing her sexual cell.
The tag on the door says thirty euros,
a whore twice the price of cab fair
back to the hotel.
He opens the door and places the money
on a small table next to the bed.
He throws her down and exacts revenge
on his dead mother.
A small, bald man comes in after,
he takes twenty euros mechanically
off the table and leaves in silence.
When the customer reaches his hotel
and smokes his last cigarette
he pays 28 dollars to connect
to his father in Cleveland
They talk away what seem the entire
6 months before the cancer ate
the remaining half of his liver.
A disease he was convinced passed through
the cells of his mother,
who had lost her last stand
fifteen years before.
The snow shakes its way out of the sky
when it reaches the swathes of light
cast by the tall lamps
above an empty parking lot
snow covered bats race between flakes
the blind doves of winter
squeeze the wind from the air like water drawn
from a fist of snow
by knuckles that glow red from the cold
and breath that escapes from the mouth
like smoky dreams from the opium den
and boot prints range across the white fields
like breasts appear spontaneously
from the white noise of adult channels
On the rainy days there weren’t people on the street,
only floating parasols, octagon carapaces
immune to the shivering blades of water.
They are toes that never dip into the ocean,
children that sat on the edge of the pool;
their own shriveled fingers
too much a reminder of mortality.
They read their future in prune claws.
When the crows leap from one glazed eye to the other,
they chide Bobby for playing on the lawn,
as they dress in a caricature of their own parents.
The tribes labor.
They dance feverishly under the anvils
held aloft.
The anvils sway slowly,
and punch holes in the sky.
Silent with potential energy,
they store the speed they would gather
hurling toward the ground.
But the anvils only sweat,
while thunder pounds
some vast metal against their surface.
Clouds part around them,
and the moon escapes monthly
from the vast canopy of their darkness
Eventually crops grow for wary farmers
and their shacks balk, the roofs unable
to fashion hope
against the grim shadows in the sky.
As those below stop scurrying,
their heads droop toward the Earth.
They crane their necks frequently,
but the anvils only wait
They would often discuss
how far they could tunnel
How deep would the anvils delve in their descent?
But no answer would suffice.
Soon buildings reach toward the sky,
step-stools against mountains.
But the question simply presses, like gravity
on the stories of stone, and steel and glass.
Schools are dedicated to the study of
science and philosophy.
Some think the anvils are living dreams,
paintings on the skies of human consciousness.
Others think they are judgment,
held back only by good deeds and love.
They fire weapons occasionally at the anvils
over oceans, but the warheads simply
fall back in great splashes in the water.
One day a divorced man forgets the anvils
he walks out of his house
out of his town
of his country
and lays down on the grass
happy.
I. September 11, 2001
When I turn on the TV,
I see black smoke
billowing from the North Tower.
It is the first time I felt
all of my senses attune
to a single object
and my mind blanket itself
in thoughtless dark.
My hands do not fidget,
and no words emerge
from the crevices
of my subconscious,
to plume like fires that burst
from shattered windows.
I am distantly aware of screams
kneading themselves
into the blank walls around me.
As my mind begins to thaw
with the realization that my building,
the South Tower, was unscathed
the second plane hit.
College life is beginning to set in,
but I know that my life begins
at this moment
and I would meet it
in the position I find myself now.
Helpless,
and on my knees.
II. Severed Elevator
I rolled from my bed as the coffin of night slowly raised its lid.
The sun always hit the windshield dead on,
for five minutes of the drive to the train station.
I parked far from the platform,
because the 6:50 is the third train of the morning.
Michael Asher, Jeremy’s father, also took the 6:50,
also worked in the World Trade Center.
We sat together and talked or slept through the ride to work.
He spoke to me one morning of abandoned mines
he had explored with his girlfriend in California,
the shafts filled with cold water and the debris
of miner’s lives. That girlfriend became a wife,
that wife a mother of two.
He worked in the north tower, I in the south.
We departed at the foundations of rock and steel
to go to our separate elevators.
We met occasionally on the ride home,
we talked about our jobs and
our love of hiking and steaks.
Two weeks after my summer job had ended
I stare at a TV, when I flip the channels the
smoke and fire follow me.
I call Jeremy’s cell phone,
because his father’s tower was hit first.
The answer to my question is the one hundred and first,
for a company called Cantor Fitzgerald.
The girlfriend is now a widow, and the phone
falls from my hand when a small piece of metal
is replayed in slow motion
crashing into my office.
III. Funeral for a Friend
A week later we are at Adam’s funeral.
His wife is besieged by breast cancer,
the growth that will not stop
swallows her complexion,
and her smile.
It is here I meet the friends and coworkers
who are left, and embrace each one
to prove they are still alive.
Adam also made it out of the building,
his was one of the few bodies recovered,
crushed under the rubble outside the front door.
The casket is closed.
At the end of the service music plays above us.
A voice that everyone in the room recognizes
but would never grace the airwaves.
It is Adam’s voice, in the band he led before
the business world stole him away.
His words slowly tear down all the walls the
crowd had erected, all the breakers erode
before the squall of those songs.
There is a dinner after the storm subsides
At some point I notice my father is not at the table.
I walk awkwardly outside, to take a break
from the intensity of dinner eulogies.
I see him by the car, his face is flushed.
I have never hugged anyone as hard as I hug him then.
It is the first time I have ever seen my father cry.
IV. To those who fell from the 84th floor
I lie in bed, rolling from side to side, staring from wall to ceiling,
unable to blink,
or conjure up any empty space,
because I am afraid.
Not the usual fear of heartbreak or mortality,
but the fear of memory.
The simple act of blinking floods my sight with faces
a new one every blink, every second of darkness is someone
who burned or fell.
With every blink, and every face, an eternity flashes forward and I
can’t keep up.
The same people who shared Chinese food and cubicles make me afraid
to close my eyes.
I lie awake with the lamps on,
but there is no comfort in white walls and dark windows.
I am waiting for tears while denying they will help.
The memorials are short, but empty caskets fall nightly into the void of my eyelids.
The sun appears through the half drawn blinds
I am sweating
I pull off my covers as if they were the death mask of some decaying pharaoh.
I don’t know how to live anymore
with the knowledge that so many lives have gone unfinished
V. August, 2004
For a while it was hard to take the ferry
past those two holes in the sky.
I was convinced the downtown smog
would avoid that patch of air.
A memory that exists
like the clarity of immediate space
around cars that drive through the night fog.
And now I take the subway,
like walking through a cemetery blindfolded.
The train buckles as if driven on rails of shame and corpses
This concrete hole in the city shivers
it is the womb of modern history
A dream played out on the eyes of a coma patient
Footsteps echo through the nearby office buildings
who have for the first time seen the sun.
What is a fit tribute to the ghosts who stumble in the dust of public records?
Any park, any place of forget and remembrance calculatingly mixed
serve only as a wilted bouquet in the terminal wing
a reminder of life for that fleeting moment
between a memory of a dead relative
and a drop of moisture pressed from the brain
to the ducts behind the eye.
All around those concrete stumps are the carrion and vultures
of tragedy
VI. Tiny Strings
I am at my most vulnerable falling asleep.
When memories drift like mist over a graveyard,
filling the black closets of thought with
colors and figures I can imagine, but cannot see.
I remember watching a bus burn.
During a clear afternoon in October
I saw one of London’s double-deckers
stop in the middle of the street,
with black smoke rising from its engine.
I saw people scurry out in waves
like rain water from a gutter.
Flames followed the smoke
and I was so awestruck, that it didn’t occur
even if I’d had a phone, to call for help.
The bright red paint darkens on the bottom
and fire fills the windows at the top of the bus
A brightly glowing tumor on Tottenham Court Road.
All of the emergency training that life affords
shimmers between eye blinks and vanishes
somewhat like dead farmers
who capture the fury of tornados in their camcorders
before their homes are sucked into the maelstrom.
I think perhaps we cannot blame those who strive
for destruction.
Who consume themselves in explosion
Maybe we should share the blame
Didn’t we create government to shelter us
from the beauty of panic?
How long is it since we forgot that the world is sewn
with the strings of spider’s silk?
A middle-aged man walks
a fluorescent street in Amsterdam,
high on hash, and purple haze.
good
He stops at the door of a leggy blonde
Do you think destitute and without options when you think leggy?
pacing her sexual cell. very good description of what it looks like
The tag on the door says thirty euros,
a whore twice the price of cab fair
back to the hotel.
“She’s” vs “whore”? Otherwise he calculates life in money? I see it in the ending.
He opens the door and places the money
on a small table next to the bed.
He throws her down and exacts revenge
on his dead mother. This is a little choppy. I recognize the act is suppose to be quick and choppy, but it comes out of nowhere especially the part about the mother
A small, bald man comes in after,
he takes twenty euros mechanically
off the table and leaves in silence.
good
When the customer reaches his hotel
and smokes his last cigarette
he pays 28 dollars to connect
to his father in Cleveland.
brings out the man's nature
They talk away what seem the entire
6 months before the cancer ate
the remaining half of his liver.
the father’s liver?
A disease he was convinced passed through
the cells of his mother,
who had lost her last stand
fifteen years before.
so, he's been waiting 15 years to rape someone to avenge the cancer that killed his mother? Or did his mother rape him, and then he raped someone . . .I'm not sure how he feels about his mother. Now, if you wanted the man to come off as almost emotionless, and I think you did, it worked. He does seem a bit like an automaton, maybe, but angry. I don't know if you need to explore the relationships with his parents more, but I need a little more to know why he treated someone else so poorly. There are many stories in this poem.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
Well, the poem is supposed to simply convey the kind of strangling anger and frustration that comes with something like a terminal disease. And how these things make you irrational, irrational enough to brutalize a working girl, the line about "exacting revenge" is meant to be a kind of barrier, a kind of jarring metaphor and slows everything to a stop, because it signifies the new direction the narrative is taking. And the prostitutes in Amsterdam are actually far from destitute or desperate, they as a profession have a union, health insurance, the works. It's not the best job, but it's hardly the street corner meth and heroin addicts we have in the states. So leggy actually is a good description of some of the remarkably beautiful women who work the red light district in Amsterdam.
The last item, which I had thought a couple of times about changing around, is making it obvious who has the liver cancer, the son or the father. But the more I played with it, the more I sort of like the line as ambiguous.
The whole poem is in a way, I can understand you wanting to learn more, to understand the rationale behind this man's choices, but the point is that there is no rationale, the whole poem lives in this entirely irrational moment. And that's all it has to be really, is a moment. Everything else becomes imput from the reader, which is why you can interpret poetry so freely.
Thankyou so much again for the comments, and for taking the time to be specific.
Steve
The snow shakes its way out of the sky
when hard time with this word without punctuation
it reaches the swathes of light
cast by the tall lamps
above an empty parking lot
snow covered bats race between flakes
the blind doves of winter
squeeze the wind from the air like water drawn
from a fist of snow
by knuckles that glow red from the cold
and breath that escapes from the mouth
like smoky dreams from the opium den I see the transtion of images without punctuation, but since this image isn't in the outside it's forced
and boot prints range why this word?
across the white fields
like breasts appear spontaneously
from the white noise I read of images to see, and I read of images to feel, but I don't read of images to hear of adult channels
If I may be bold - I don't sense you in this poem, as I sense you in your other poems. I sense you trying out someone else's style.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
how everyone can sustain a level of creativity is beyond me
your awesome
On the rainy days there weren’t people on the street,
only floating parasols, why this word?
octagon carapaces
immune to the shivering blades of water.
If they are older to the point of shriveled, then the blood doesn't flow as well, and they could get colder faster. Who is this line about?
They are toes are they actually toes?
that never dip into the ocean,
children that sat on the edge of the pool; I like this.
their own shriveled fingers
too much a reminder of mortality.
They read their future in prune claws.
When the crows leap from one glazed eye why glazed? Are they on too many painkillers or anti-coagulants?
to the other,
they chide Bobby for playing on the lawn,
as they dress in a caricature of their own parents. Of their parents when they were alive? If they were caricatures of death it would fit the metal images of the beginning.
I liked this. This is one of my favorite poems of yours. Have you read novels by Anita Brookner? Her writing is really sharp, and a couple of her books I read were about older people who found themselves alone.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird