new poem- no title yet

[SleepyWitch]

hey everyone.. i came up with this poem last night... i've never written any poems before (until this Sunday that is :) ). as you can see from my other posts this one is totally different in style......
I'm not good with rhymes and metres... i didn't even try actually :)
please criticize :)


In Coventry one summer night
I had this bright idea
to write about the three of us,
of love, loss and despair.
Adultery, lust, development,
it sure is all in there,
along with swimming pools and schools,
with her friends and with mine.
A twisted plot, the cactus and the kids,
they all fell into place.

I had not time to write it down,
so what I did was plan.
I planned it out and turned it round,
and started making sense.

Now in the cold I walk the streets
and see her golden face
in every stranger that I pass
and in the barren lanes.
Some days I look and find her eyes
a hundred silly times.
But when I don't, she finds me here
and leaves me with my lines.

[Sharkán]

This work has a strong sense of flow & continuity--for one who casts themself as rhyme- and metre-deaf, this work shows amazing rhythm. The rhyming isn't the forced pattern of couplets. Rather the "spirit" if you will seems to move the words.

Hmm, I'm not always certain about what I say, but I do know this poem shows structure and matter. A little sardonic even?

[SleepyWitch]

Hey Sharkán thanks for your nice comment :)
I'm gald to hear my poems got flow and continuity :)

[Petrarch's Love]

Sleepy Witch-- I am in complete agreement with Sharkan's previous comment that you really have a good ear for the rhythm of the language, especially if this is your first attempt at poetry. I especially like the last line, and the lines near the beginning:

to write about the three of us,
of love, loss and despair.
It's nice the way "the three of us" seems to refer to three different people, but instead of going on to refer to their three names, you refer to three emotions. It gives an immediate sense of what the relationship between these three amounts to.

The one thing I would criticise is that it sometimes seems to me that the poem is a bit disjointed. For example, you present us with a great image like "the cactus and the kids" but then you don't go anywhere with it and the reader feels that it's an arresting line without really understanding the significance of it. It would be great to refer back to a line like that. "Her face" also appears suddenly in the third stanza but we don't have a clear idea of who "she" is. This is just my reading of course. I would encourage you to continue writing--even if only for your own enjoyment. As I said before, you seem to have a good ear which matters a lot in poetry, and with some practice to get better controll over both your style and presentation of the content I think you might develop an interesting voice. Best of luck.

[SleepyWitch]

Hey Petrarch's Love thanks for your comment :)
yep i know my poem is a bit cryptic.. i was too lazy to make things clear :)
.. it's about the same story as a novel i want to write but haven't written on in ages.. so maybe if i ever finish the novel, i can use the poem as a prologue and then it will be clear to readers after they've read the novel :)
the problem is that the novel is loosely based on a true story and the poem refers to the characters from the novel and/or the people it is based on..... hehe,so it's a meta-literary kind of things, which makes things complicated

[Xamonas Chegwe]

I like the crypticism. I'm too lazy to make my poems cryptic enough! Not knowing the details behind the references stirs up images, that's an important part of poetry for me. As long as there's a coherence there to cling to, which those images don't drown out.

I really liked it. Can't believe it's your first. You must write more.

[SleepyWitch]

errr? i hit the wrong key... how can i delete this?