A porcelain doll in your buttercup dress, even the homeless drunk knows you would shatter from the mere pressure of a soft embrace. He’ll tell you riddles till you laugh but he sees his own despair in your thin smile. At least he has a bottle to hide behind.
If those Pacific eyes are the windows to your soul, well I’m pretty sure you put up blackout curtains years ago. Now you only cry at sad movies and on buses.
Adorned with sparrows, broken hearts and handguns your words wait anxious perched on door handles, in mailboxes and in tip jars at pizza joints. Your lists of imagery always come back to teeth. They’ll be pearls or fenceposts but always falling out, your tongue always swelling. Perpetually choking on cotton and blood like a penny in a pillow. Strangers will read your poetry and forget how to breathe, forget how to believe. Are you handing out suicide notes en masse?
A contest entry
- Come Convince me I'm not Wasting my Time With AP! by Minstrel Knight.
800 points, ended September 27, 2007, 21 entries
Honorable mention
• next poem in this contest, remove from contest
Please tell me what you think
Comments
1 - 5 of 5
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this is incredibly descriptive and very powerful.
& I'm SOO loving that it was done in an original way... this style and subject can get so old if it's not freshened up and unique. You did a fabulous job avoiding all of that, and it turned out wonderfully. -
I was a little unsure about this at first, but it came together quickly. Many poems in this style and genre seem cliche, but I think you've done a great job with this. It has a dreary, bleak beauty to it if that makes sense. You have some pretty unique ways of expressing and describing these things. I especially liked these lines "Adorned with sparrows, broken hearts and handguns your words wait anxious perched on door handles, in mailboxes and in tip jars at pizza joints." As well as the last line, which really struck a chord with me. I might be wrong on what you were shooting at but to me it reminded me of a person using suicide threats in their poetry to try and subtly cry for attention, it makes me unsure as to whether I should pity or feel sorry for this person, which is good I think. Reasons for things like this are often complex and conviluted such that it would be hard to say whether or not one should feel sorry for them or be mad at them. Anyways good job, you've sufficiently shown me that a style so often redone and cliched can be fresh and original.
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Well thanks very much for the feedback. It's actually about a gf of mine who makes little 'zines to hand out and they're often rather depressing but she's not actually suicidal or making suicide threats, it's just often the way her writing is interpreted. I do think that by handing out your poetry to strangers you're definitely desperate to reach out and connect with others but hey aren't we all. It's also a true story that a homeless man started talking about how shy she is and that her shell needs to crack. He asked me if there was progress and I just thought it was so profound that he could see that. Thanks very much for reading.
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Nice. The title sucked me in!!
"If those Pacific eyes are the windows to your soul, well I’m pretty sure you put up blackout curtains years ago."
Not a waste, at all.
-Cheers.
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I'm glad you liked the "well" in there. My bf wasn't sure about it but I wanted it to read a little more like spoken word.
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