sign pen

[blp]

all day
glass
walls and windows
walls in shadow
people sitting in the quiet of glassed off space
lips in motion

coloured notes
on glass
translucent
windows
wall
white notes
clouds

the people’s hair
glows white
against the glass
white light
halos
of hot hair
insights

the heat from which
could fry
an egg
black marks
on paper
punctuate the light

[Adolescent09]

Gee, Nice!!! You've got a great way with words!

I like this more than your previous poem. I love the way you are able to manipulate a image into various physical forms of place and life.
This is the way I construe it: You lay the grounds with the phrase "all day", making it appear that this is an ever-occurring process, throughout the day. "Walls and windows", "walls in shadow" remind me of a winter evening in a windy city in Chicago or the black carpet over Las Vegas. Therefore these two terms set the imperceptible "place" which is very good. The rest of the poem can be attributed to random discussion in a shop. A Starbucks Coffee Shop fits the picture most idyllically (in my perception at least).

Then the next stanza is superb! You practically rephrase everything you said in the first stanza! I really like it :) The only thing different is the "colored notes" which may likely be associated with what the people in the "coffee shop" are saying. Sweet. Translucent windows next to walls (below?) white clouds. It all clicks. I've got a stronger picture of the "place" now.

Then the people's hair is white. There is white light. Allthough the skies are dark the atmosphere is bright. Simply Wonderful! Halo fits beautifully and so does "hot air" which fits more with the atmosphere.

I think the only problem, or the only thing I'm confused with is the inclusion of the word "insights". Holy people or the "haloed ones" can of course insight us on a secular or pious level. Their haloed insight "can fry an egg" which I don't exactly understand (but I'm sure it must allude to/ or mean something). The last two lines, "black marks on paper punctuate the light". Do you mean that their haloed abilities are able to darken the light? I thought they would make the dark light? Lol, sorry if I misunderstood the last part but I really like everything else :)

[white camellia]

I like the coloured notes on glass. This work, and the last one, both are felt by me as some oil paintings, in which there are not many colours, but impressive enough.

This to me looks like a moment on a clear summer day.

I also like black marks on paper/punctuate the light. Such a contrast-white and black, spreading and concentrated, continuous and intermittent, dynamic and comparatively static...

And yes, could be somewhere like café, or a boardroom for negotiation...

[blp]

Thanks. You're both right about the location. I wrote it in an office (whisper it: on company time) where they've recently built some glassed off meeting rooms, but was also thinking about people seen through a coffee shop window at lunchtime.

I think the end has problems. Not sure these repetitious poems really need to go anywhere and it can be quite irritating when they do in a way. The insights thing is sort of a satire on the kind of stuff that goes on in offices of the sort I work in, where they're always dealing in things like 'user insights' and, pertinently, 'hot insights', so it was a joke really, the idea that these halos of hot hair (not 'air', adolescent, though easy to misread, and somewhat purposely so) actually represented what was inside these people's heads, not outside. Still, I bumped up the ridiculousness of this in the last stanza and that, I think, was overly intrusive. I will think seriously about shaving it down a bit.

Was thinking a little of George Oppen's wonderful second poem in his Discrete Series, in which the phrases 'cracking eggs' and 'big business' both occur.

[white camellia]

Was thinking a little of George Oppen's wonderful second poem in his Discrete Series, in which the phrases 'cracking eggs' and 'big business' both occur.

Thus

Hides the
Parts--the prudery
Of Frigidaire, of
Soda-jerking----

Thus

Above the

Plane of lunch, of wives
Removes itself
(As soda-jerking from
the private act

Of
Cracking eggs);

big-Business

[blp]

That's the one. Great.