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Hey TL. I recently finished editing an old poem of mine. Just thought I would share it with you to see how you like it. All the best!
Grin
Red running butterflies perch upon your skin.
One by one they drift on down to blanket you in grins.
The wingéd silence lays upon you
blessing carnal sins while pictured pleasure pricks and
stings hold a body stiff.
Until it falters, listless,
climbing into perfect lacking,
the millions of tiny mirrors flying red and running
whispers on your skin.
The soft caress of hair on hair on scaly wings
Bursting to relieve the pitch and hum of harmony
and harmony’s a flutter,
reverberating heart beats butter,
soaring,
roaring over sallow grasping,
sinking,
the weight of wings compressing sexual tradition
as they slide and fall off one by one;
your lips are lighter.
Your eyes tense up for your lost lover running red,
the butterfly dissolving in your skin.
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flowSthead,
Grin has some great language and some creative uses of poetic devices. I enjoyed the fantastical merge between a butterfly and a human. Lines like "the soft caress of hair on hair on scaly wings" and "the butterfly dissolving in your skin" are both great lines. However, Grin seems like a poem that begs to be a poem, rather than accepting itself as a collection of images with a structure to it, i.e. the language seems forced. It's very melodramatic at points, and particular words and phrases like "winged silence" and "mirrors flying red" accentuate the melodrama. The images in the poem are very strong, but abstractions like these, along with the sparse appearances of rhyme in the first parts of each stanza take a lot away from the strengths in the poem.
On your next revision, try telling us exactly what is happening. Don't give us a sense of mystery, where the abstract ideas take away from your beautiful images, but instead catalog the real world inside the poem, add in the fantastical elements of the butterfly, describe this world in plain but interesting and fresh language, and you might find some improvements for this already very good poem.
Best of luck!
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Yeah man, this is great!
I really like the line
Bursting to relieve the pitch and hum of harmony
because when I read it, I kept expecting it to end from the sort of finality each of those words have when you say them (pitch, hum, harmony), but it kept bursting forward. It made all of those words (hum especially) really really dramatic and exciting.
One thing I would suggest is that you hide the rhyme on the first two lines a little bit. The rhythm of the lines kind of obscures what you are doing and makes it feel singsongy. The jarring lack of rhythm in the following line doesn't really strike me as profound (the dissonance in the rhythm, not the actual words in the poem) and I think you'd be better off if you broke that rhyme a little bit.
Now, personally I really liked the accent on the e in wingéd (it made the word itself looked winged), but if I showed up to one of my classes and I tried to pull that kind of stunt they'd slap me in the face (metaphorically). Among academia and poets today its considered kind of pretentious to do that kind of thing in your work if you don't have the chops to back it up. I don't personally think its pretentious, but I do think that any magazine or publication you'd submit it to will certainly think so. The line is strong enough as winged, you'll have a poem more people will like if you make it look more natural.
Of course if you want to keep playing with accents and stuff like that you might end up like e.e. cummings and be a totally creative and innovative dude and that's cool too. Just be aware that those sorts of people have some trouble publishing their stuff at first.
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Great job! I thought overall the whole thing was really good! I will say that the only line I didnt especially like was "One by one they drift on down to blanket you in grins." I'm not sure if it was the way it rhymes with the first line, or just the way it's phrased but it just seems kind of off to me. Just my opinion! Like I said, overall it was very enjoyable
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Thanks for all the comments. I will keep them in mind next time I take to editing this poem. I am fairly self critical in regards to my poetry so I can't say that I think it's good enough to want to be published; it's just something I do that I enjoy. I am really glad you enjoyed it though!
:-)
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EPT
