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[MorpheusSandman]

Weeds break
through the sidewalks near
termite-eaten telephone poles.
Disintegrating wooden remains
of a society suffering
neurasthenia.
What signals do these lines carry?
Broken voices, empty
Phonetics.
Post-modernism has taught us to distrust signs.
So I anxiously
step through these blasted
brick buildings, feeling the souls
escape through the corners and
the cracks.
Spectral echoes bouncing
off the walls
like balls in
Newton’s Cradle.

I, like a canine
stray from mankind’s pack,
wander up and down these concrete constructions.
Searching for puddles of yesterday’s muddy
rainwater
in the ditches and low-lying
ground
to lap it up. I run from the grumbling
dragons with blinding eyes that
follow each other like ants in a line.
I feel the oppression
of these wide-open spaces.
Freedom drives men mad.
That’s why they paint those white and yellow lines and
follow them to pre-planned destinations.
I would too if
only I knew where
to go.

[Hawkman]

Hi Morpheus,

I rather like this poem. A little negatively charged perhaps but it speaks to me. I was particularly taken with these lines:

“What signals do these lines carry?
Broken voices, empty
Phonetics.”

“Spectral echoes bouncing
off the walls
like balls in
Newton’s Cradle.”

These two phrases seem to be matched and remind me of a story I was once told by a radio ham. He claimed that 40 years after the Battle of Britain, if conditions in the ionosphere were right, it was still possible to hear the conversations of fighter pilots and their controllers, as they engaged in their life and death struggle for supremacy in the sky.

Although unlikely, this is not actually impossible. HF radio signals which escape the earth, continue out, deep into space at the speed of light. RF which is bounced around the globe off the ionosphere might also continue, although getting weaker and more and more distorted, and eventually buried in all the other RF signals constantly being emitted on our planet.

Anyway, back to your poem.

“Post-modernism has taught us to distrust signs.
So I anxiously
step through these blasted
brick buildings, feeling the souls
escape through the corners and
the cracks.”

This section, coming as it does between the other two, I feel is misplaced. it divides the stream of thought. I would suggest placing it after the second. This way it develops the theme instead of disrupting it. Just a thought.

Best. H.

[Bar22do]

Weeds break
through the sidewalks near
termite-eaten telephone poles.
Disintegrating wooden remains
of a society suffering
neurasthenia.
What signals do these lines carry?
Broken voices, empty
Phonetics.
Post-modernism has taught us to distrust signs.
So I anxiously
step through these blasted
brick buildings, feeling the souls
escape through the corners and
the cracks.
Spectral echoes bouncing
off the walls
like balls in
Newton’s Cradle.

I, like a canine
stray from mankind’s pack,
wander up and down these concrete constructions.
Searching for puddles of yesterday’s muddy
rainwater
in the ditches and low-lying
ground
to lap it up. I run from the grumbling
dragons with blinding eyes that
follow each other like ants in a line.
I feel the oppression
of these wide-open spaces.
Freedom drives men mad.
That’s why they paint those white and yellow lines and
follow them to pre-planned destinations.
I would too if
only I knew where
to go.

Your poem, Morpheus, cuts my heart and soul, even if I find shades of a hope here and there ("feeling the souls escape through the corners and the cracks"; "wooden remains", "puddles of muddy rainwater" still reminding of Life).
As I read it at least, I feel the continuation in your thought's development and can see how the souls, escaping, are "spectral echoes bouncing... etc", so your lines order looks fine and in place to me, but it may be a question of interpretation and Hawk might be right as well.
I have a quibble about the end of your poem which, IMO, would do better without "Freedom drives men mad" which sounds a bit trite while you can trust the reader, I believe "the white and yellow lines" are enough of an allusion to the idea. Thus (with just a slight change in line breaks):

"I feel the oppression
of these wide-open spaces.
Men paint those white and yellow lines and
follow them to pre-planned destinations.
I would too if only I knew
where to go."

Your poem renders so effectively our loss of points of reference, souls disorientation and loneliness... its strength is overwhelming; it's also a dreary (though so needed I think) a gate to crucial insights re our inevitably collapsing societies.

Yet, a drop of water, a handful of mud, are they not sufficient for life to start all over again, hopefully in a wiser, more harmonious mode...? This is the hope I retain.

Thank you for this wonderful, mind shaking, beautifully written poem.

Warm regards - Bar

[Delta40]

I like how it incites me to walk through the clutter of humankind, a part of its waste and yet separate. beautiful use of expression. I especially liked

So I anxiously
step through these blasted
brick buildings, feeling the souls
escape through the corners and
the cracks.

[PrinceMyshkin]

Wonderful albeit bleak poem. I especially admire how you maintain the feel of a person talking off the cuff without ever abandoning the poetic discipline of this.

[dizzydoll]

This is a very deep, powerful poem. Good work. :biggrin5:

[hillwalker]

What a brilliant poem - I particularly noticed the trouble you took to split certain phrases between the end of one line and the beginning of the next :

empty > phonetics
blasted > brick buildings
stray > from Mankind's pack

a poem about alienation whose ideas very much bounce off each other 'like balls in / Newton's Cradle'

Very enjoyable, really.

H

[J.D. Sparks]

Hmm, I feel like I'll have to give this poem a few more reads. It warrants them. I, too, loved the part about Newton. I wonder, though, why you chose to represent (what I presume to be) cars as dragons that are in turn like ants. Dragons and even ants both seem to have so much vitality (granted, ants can be a bit boringly mechanical, but still, they'e very natural in contrast to the postmodern systems of a city aren't they? And if they're not, are the city systems so unnatural?) It just seemed a bit odd to me to use that kind of imagery. But I could be reading it wrongly anyways!

[RaoulDuke]

I feel this poem will strike a chord with anyone who loves walking through the forgotten parts of a city, and imagining what the place was like when new and vibrant.

"Freedom drives men mad.
That’s why they paint those white and yellow lines and
follow them to pre-planned destinations."

- I'm a sucker for (good) poems that mention roads figuratively. I don't know what it is, maybe I'm restless and yearning for the open road... Anyway, these lines strike the right note with me.

[MorpheusSandman]

As always, I'm overwhelmed by the deluge of thoughtful responses, appreciation, and criticism.

@Hawk: That's interesting about the signals of old pilots. It seems like I've heard about this somewhere (maybe on Discovery Channel?) but can't quite remember. Considering this piece was a patchwork of various stream-of-conscious ideas I'd had I was worried about the flow. I can understand how you feel it's a bit disruptive and I can't really provide an argument against it. I will think about restructuring this a bit.

@Bar: As always, your criticism is often just as poetic as the poems you're critiquing! I thoroughly agree about the triteness of the line in question. I often like to interrupt "poetic" thoughts with lines which seem more direct and prose-like, but in this instance I do think you're right that it's stronger without it. I'm supremely satisfied that the piece could move you so much. :)

@Hill: Using line breaks effectively is something I'm constantly striving to be more conscious about, so I'm extremely happy you took the time to point them out here. I guess I had a double purpose with them, in terms of wanting the enjambment to carry the reader easily through the piece, but also to separate words and thoughts so that multiple meanings could be suggested through the fractured thoughts. Such as with "Like a canine || Stray from mankind's pack" I wanted it to be a bit ambiguous as to whether "canine" was a noun or adjective and whether "stray" was a verb or noun.

@J.D.: I certainly think you voice a legitimate complaint. Honestly, in using the dragon imagery I merely attempted to imagine what a car rolling down the road must seem like to scared, stray dog, and I thought "dragon" was an appropriately fierce image. With ants, though, I consciously wanted a very distinct contrast to dragon, because ants ARE mechanical, and rather small and insignificant to even a dog.

Raoul: I'm also satisfied that you noted the main inspiration for this piece, namely walking around the more dilapidated parts of a city. Living in the middle-class suburbs like I do it's just an hour's walk away both from the really nice neighborhoods and houses and the parts of the city which seem to be crumbling into nothingness. But it's really in those parts where I feel there's a beauty because of the sense of life that once thrived there, but now merely hangs on and exists like ghostly artifacts.

@Delta, Prince, & Dizzy: Thanks!

[lallison]

I enjoyed reading this. It solicits a slow, careful reading and contemplation. You have a lot of great lines here. I especially liked the ending, which pulled it all together and left me feeling a bit lost. It feels like a world on the verge of apocalypse.

[blank|verse]

It's an interesting piece, Morpheus, but I think you're more confident, and better, writing in set metres and forms.

The constant line breaks I find annoying; the British poet James Fenton described this reliance on placing single words on a line of free verse to try to
emphasize
their
importance
as
'adolescent'.

Other than that, there doesn't seem to be any guiding principle behind the lines, I suppose they wander around like you do, but don't have any rhythm and the poem isn't very satisfying to read. Have you read it out loud?

[PrinceMyshkin]

The constant line breaks I find annoying; the British poet James Fenton described this reliance on placing single words on a line of free verse to try to
emphasize
their
importance
as
'adolescent'.



The poet who proclaims
this or that technique
“adolescent,”
proclaims himself to be
“adult,” but,
to paraphrase Orwell,
Some adults are more adult
than others!

[MorpheusSandman]

Actually, I think your critique is quite accurate, BV. I DO feel much more at home in meters and forms, but I'm always trying to push myself into areas I don't feel completely comfortable because, well, how else can I improve? But in defense of single-word lines, I only use them 3 times here in the span of 37 lines which I hardly call egregious use. Honestly, I wrote this piece in prose and then structured it afterward, and I also think your criticism that there's a lack of a "guiding principle" is correct as well. I admit I do feel rather lost in free verse as to how to break lines and structure a piece. I'm certainly open to advise. As for reading it aloud, I have, and I generally tried to keep the general beats between lines about even or one apart. So the first several lines read 234322, for example, and I thought the rising/falling of the beats-per-line would provide a certain rhythm, and in the two extreme drop-offs in the second meter I thought created a kind of metrical "valley" that echoed what I was saying. Other than that, and what I expressed to Hill above, I didn't think about much else.