The tinkerman is blue:
His heart is made of shrapnel
His blood is filled with shavings that sting
Piercing his capillaries
Reminding him not to smile too broadly
Or laugh too loudly
At the misery of others

Soon he will be leaving:
This world doesn't want him
His heart is heavy
With the shrapnel of a thousand hurts
Arrow tips left by an acrid Eros
Broken shafts tearing through his shirt
Chest wounds salved with dried blood

In the dark,
The tinkerman sleeps
And dreams of another night
  
(The tinkerman, v 3.0, 10/05)
(I keep starting with the same two lines and trying to finish it -- the first
two lines beg for something, and I can't quite direct it. So I'm putting this
out there... where does this go wrong? Where does this go right?)

8 responses total.

I like the last three lines.  The entire poem up to that point leads you
around with the words... The thoughts don't unfold, they're circular, like
you want to say something but are still hovering over the idea; I had a
teacher that used to call that "window dressing."  IMHO: cut out the
reitteration of blood and pain images, and give those images clarity of
purpose by fleshing then out. 

(some shit to ponder: who's the tinkerman, where did he get hurt, who hurt
him?  whom is he laughing at?  is he a bum on the corner, world-weary and
hungry, lost?  a lover scorned?  those're things that I would like to know.)

Another version for your consumption...
This is closer to what I think it's supposed to be in the end.

The tinkerman is blue
His heart is made of shrapnel
He serves it to me on a brass tray
I don't like the sauce
The odor is too great

He used to be me
A shadow in my night
My hands dissolve as I stroke his heart
Feel it pulse beneath my fingertips
Glints of shrapnel scrape my skin

I used to be him
Before he devoured me
I swam through his veins
Avoided the shavings
That danced around his bones

He spat me out, and I him
Mutual disgorgement
Until we were both no more
Slipped within the crevices of afterthoughts
And neverminds

Now I dance among the stars
As he wallows in the guise of sobriety
In the dark
The tinkerman sleeps
And dreams of another night
  
(I'm not sure I like the last three lines at all, actually, but if Erinn keeps
rooting for them, maybe I'll keep them. ;} )

hmm, thius is good, but kinda gory!!!hehe My mind is full of weird images
right now!!!  I myself like the last three lines..!!
I especially like the section that starts with "he used to be me"..I like the
way that one ends.. (by the way I am commenting on the second version here!)
I don't like the line about being "spat out" not sure why though..

I liked "My hands dissolve as I stroke his heart" -- very good.  It's still
choppy, though; the addition of the new images cold be added a little more
fluidly.

>I didn't really care for the first two lines in the "spat out" section,
>>either, it seemed like instead of conveying an image or feeling, they were
>>more like a summary of events before going back to the poem. And until that
>>line, I wasn't thinking about the two characters as eating each other but
>as becoming each other, so it was a shock for me to read that line, because
I had to think about the earlier lines differently.

Fascinating!  :)  

The second version does seem to be clearer, more poetic; perhaps it introduces
some things that weren't in the first.  In v3.1 (for want of a better label),
I hope I'm not imagining things when I perceive it as a confrontation, a kind
of eerie duel between the tinkerman with his shrapnel heart and "you".  I
think I'm mainly getting this out of the first and second stanzas, which I
think are the strongest.  The third and fourth stanzas might then refer to
previous encounters between the two of you, kind of Luke Skywalker/Darth Vader
history, if I may be forgiven for a trite metaphor.  :) 
  Then in the fifth stanza, the confrontation is over, and you've won, the
tinkerman quiescent - for now.  I find myself a little let down; I wanted to
see the rest of the duel, *how* you win.  

As it stands, however, this has a much higher poetry to verse ratio than I've
seen recently.  Good show!

Not to be contrary, brighn, but the last three lines are my favorites also.
The idea of dreaming about _what other things you could be dreaming about_
-- which is how I read them, anyway -- is fascinating to me.  

I'm not sure what I think about the two versions relative to each other.  The
first sounds nicer, IMO, but the second is a bit clearer.  (Well, that's not
even true; some of the imagery in v3.1 I like a lot better -- the "shavings
that dance around his bones" and such.)

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