Sunday, September 13, 2009

ends (2009)


low on content / snack
on puzzles

27 yrs on a food-
free diet

later found munching on
a chocolate Buddha

graffiti on the cistern
said religion should be flushed

gods do demand a great deal

not down with what
has so far been said /
interjection anxiety

fielding questions from
night / emptying its emptiness

TV left ghosting
as background buffer

cashew overdose / more
football than ever before

‘keep to the news’ –

earnings territorialise / mind
gets operated

knowing who
to know

(your score)

6 comments:

  1. I really liked this poem stu, there are great sentences, great random stuff, I wanted to tell it to you before, indeed I did, but I lost the comment due trough a computer failure.
    Keep writting and searching for what you need to say and the way you would like to say it preciselly, I think you are on the right track

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  2. Thanks Mariana.

    Yeah, there's a lot of random stuff here. I think I understand the connections between them, but some may not be obvious to the reader - who will of course make their own connections.

    I think at a couple of points around the middle of the poem the thread's probably lost a bit. Precision usually comes with rewriting / revision. It can take years and years! :)

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  3. Yeah, the thread slithers out of my grasp at that tercet around the middle, "not happy with what..." The TV disgorging empty palaver into the night resumes the emptiness/content motif with which the poem begins, and from then on it's plain sailing--until the last three or four lines, perhaps, which seem to me a collage of the kind of words one hears while watching the news.

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  4. It's funny, that tercet had been bugging me. I've changed it to "not down with...", which came to me as I was about to fall asleep last night (before I'd read your comment). But it probably still needs more thinking through.

    "a collage of the kind of words one hears while watching the news" - yeah, well I guess the TV was ghosting in the background, at least while parts of this were composed. A poem is, at least partly, a record of its composition (Cf. O'Hara et al).

    Thanks for your comments - great to receive some constructive feedback. :)

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  5. It occurred to me that "not happy with" might relate to the first line. "[L]ow on content" could mean low on satisfaction as well as low on something contained in a receptacle (like the contents of a cistern or meaning in a poem). If you amend "happy" to "down," that median tercet will be bound more securely to the first line--bound sonically and imagistically as well as conceptually.

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  6. Thanks David - I agree with your reading of those lines. And yeah, I think "down" is an improvement.

    I think it's time to leave this one alone for a while though, then return to it with fresh eyes.

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