I can't say this is a spectacular piece in any shape or form, but I did put in a substantial amount of effort while sipping my morning coffee, which, if all else fails, should count for something. My landscape of choice was a ruined prairie-land.
Packed-up for a no-return
Eldest son has a picture of a tree in his
breast pocket; the only facial feature
worth recalling of their prior home.
Snowballed birches, knickers, crowbars for
occasional stand-alone doors between
here and the other side of the country
between here and all the wine-glasses
dad will wrench from his children's dry fingers.
>> Okay, whether correct or not, the images I receive from some of these passages would seem to signify the keepers. Somebody having a tree growing out of their face and pelting a pair of pantyhose with snowballs are all activities I can groove on. Were you poking fun at Robert Frost with the mention of birches? biggrin
>> WHY ARE "STAND-ALONE DOORS" LOCATED IN THE MIDDLE OF A LINE? HOW CAN YOU PUT THEM BETWEEN THINGS. DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO VISUALIZE THIS, I HAVE TO SCHEDULE A DENTIST APPOINTMENT TO DO SO. (The rest of the house should be fallen down, if the door is free-standing-- YES, IF I WERE TO LIVE IN A WORLD OF FREE-STANDING METAPHOR PICTURE DOORS I WOULD MENTION THAT THE POLICE KICK HOUSES DOWN)
>> You know you could say "occasional stand-alone crowbar" to help distinguish it in your list structure. You see, I'm already imposing my will upon it by making it singular and leaning it against a haybale cube.
>> I'm not sure yet at this time why the children represent prohibition. Interesting concept though. Nor am I aware of the engine that wine-glasses would be screwed into using wrenches. HOPE YOU WEREN'T EXPECTING ME TO PLAY FAIR ON THIS CRITIQUE XDDD
Tongues hang out of their luggage bags,
lolling, more poetic than chat-speak
With drawn-out breathing,
the wife pins a daisy to her clavicle,
the man glances, sparing from his Dust Bowl larynx
a compliment, lizard-bones clattering from his gums
remnants of yesterday's reptile repas
the last supper, before their six children
were blown away, parachuted by pig-tail
-bridled Dust Devils
into an afterlife better than this one.
"We're proud parents, but damn, we're sad as hell."
>> "Tongues hang out of their luggage bags" is such a Felix-ism that it can only be marked with a red bow-tie of pride. They're like kittens with little eyes and noses, yar? Possibly an extreme case of personification, a mega-animalification.
>> I'm glad you read lol as loll and not l.o.l. for it signifies your connection with the older generation. Though haven't you set up a straw man here? Anything should be more poetic than chatspeak. Even lazy cartoon tongues suffering from asthma.
>> "the wife pins a daisy to her clavicle" -> Conjuring a Tim Burton vibe here.
>> "the man glances, sparing from his Dust Bowl larynx" -> I dunno about these "double-verb" effects you are going for; it seems like the uncertainty weakens the line. The word-proximity is strange to me as well-- if using a structure like this I would tend to park the gerund at the end of a line or at the beginning of a new line. The middle tends to be the weakest area to place a thought, though possibly a caesura priestess could instruct it to the ways of fertility.
>> "parachuted by pig-tail-bridled Dust Devils" -> I kid you not, this imagery and its surrounding support section is perhaps the Hitler-master of the entire poem. Sometimes I've seen you pull the alliteration card just for funsies, but here it's damn form functional.
At many towns they could have fended off the ghosts,
holed up in there and made a life on borrowed time
and rented picket fences dyed beige from the sandstorms
but that would not have been living. There is a stake
flashing green-lit in the distance, across
an emptied and evaporated bay. There, you do not owe
the growth of your fingernails
to higher forces
and do not pay for the privilege of
starving.
>> "could have fended off" -> I gotta wonder if you pulled out some obscure past tense subdivision from the dank depths of a grammar text just to stump me on whether or not it is a legal construction. Fortunately I can sidestep into a glimmery poetry world and quickly identify "could have's" and "would not's" as musical diseases. Don't get me wrong, the content here is excellent; but the structure is so prose-sentencefied it comes across like a wet towel you'd never be able to twist and snap someone's butt with. There's no *bounce*, and lacking that quality I feel it would be a disservice to call it a stanza. The good news is that you can give it a musical injection with a little bit of effort. And by all means do something about the following breaks:
-> There is a stake
-> There, you do not owe
>> These are about the most notorious, mainstream, modern-poe sadmen you can deploy. "stake" and "owe" are given all the emphasis of a Big Beautiful Woman wearing a mid-drift too-small-shirt. There's a sense of hold-your-breath, here's a forced meaning attachment, exhale. You don't want these critters sticking out like that, trust me on this.
Oh, and if you ever see me writing like this, make sure you get the jar of necrotized-flesh-eating ladybugs out of storage blaugh
>> Another possibly with stake would be to use a short line enjambment, like so:
"a stake
flashing green-lit
in the distance,
across from
an evaporated bay."
At least this way you gain a sense of structural isolation with brief flashes. If you can't show it without saying it, at the very least get your content lined up with the frame.
With a passing glance at her chest, the wife realizes
the daisy had mounted a train-station platform to better places
the wind had with it, taken her clavicle. Appearing miserable,
she wrinkles her face with her hands, to hide, un-ironed, in a state
of sand and old age, the fact that she'd been dropping bones.
Her husband whispers hoarsely from the corners of thin lips:
"I still like you." and dust spills from between his teeth.
>> I like this stanza for its sturdy development of the narrative; at first I didn't know what was up with your clavicle-obsession but here it is revealed to be quite the sorrowful transitional event. It brings to mind a poem I did a while back where I died among cornhusk curtains and flower-print pillows (Or something crazy like that, possibly influenced by a Grateful Dead poster).
There is a great emptiness that
in its open-booked vastness
flicks with a curled thumb and index finger
black ants off a picnic table.
>> Why the t-alliteration in the first line, are you trying to conjure Freddy for my nightmares? "There" and "that" have no place alongside a stophat which is tophated; do not deny your destiny...
>> Ah, these four lines strike me as a near-tribute of a Rubaiyat Grim Reaper, perhaps you could adopt a similar pattern?
Before bed, sipping broth from scavenged scapulae
The grass throatily complains, defeated all around them.
They clutch one another's rib-cages on communed warmth
abstain from ever voting
and thank god anyway.
>> I might opt for "...the grass lays in complaint..." or some equivalent variation of the tenses. Really your power verb in this section is describing the grass as defeated, and though cartooning the grass is always appreciated you may want to go full-on with the image of purgatorial soldiers (Red Badge of Courage, Ambrose Bierce, etc etc).
>> I don't know how viable it is as a leave-off, but in the last two lines I spotted a neat flip in "abstain from ever believing, but thank you for voting anyway." Either way I think you are stabbing at a certain tunnel-vision indifference, though it leads to a larger question of why individual decisions no longer matter in the world. Being a Libertarian myself, it's interesting how you could be equating the hug-boxes of both religion and government.
