Grex Poetry Conference

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Grex Poetry Item 276: untitled, for Greg <rcl>
Entered by rlawson on Sat Aug 18 01:23:59 UTC 2001:

it's not difficult to see
where your mind goes
when your eyes lose focus
I've watched you go there
so often I would need no map
to follow you
to the base of her world
which you feel the need to
hold up upon your shoulders

but your head keeps spinning all the while
and you enter into a trance, arresting you
in that place between forgetting and
remembering

and watching you,
I've come to realize
the extent of the pain that you feel
in reading the poetry you hide
carefully among conversation,
begging an unanswered question

so we settle for
the fact that six days will follow
this one
then seven more--
and seven more and seven more--
and weeks will give way
to birthdays and Christmases
until the forever of the
rest of our lives

still, there's the knowing full well
the work from this day is not done
and if not tomorrow,
then soon

we will be sad again.

28 July 2001.

1 responses total.

#1 of 1 by orinoco on Sat Aug 18 11:55:15 2001:

Do the first few stanzas remind anyone else of lyrics to a Cake song, or is
it just me?  (It's a good thing.  Cake rocks my world.  I want to marry their
guitarist.)

This is very nicely put together.  It flows almost like an argument; it's not
until the end of the poem that the whole picture is clear, but by the last
line everything fits together.  If you want to keep working on it, though,
you could play a lot with the language on a line-by-line basis.  Some of the
phrases -- `that place between forgetting and remembering,' `unanswered
question,' `the forever of the rest of your lives' -- are a bit cliched.  It's
as if the words themselved were undermining all the nice things you're doing
with the structure and images of this one.

It's definitely nice to have you back in the conference.

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