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twoheadedboy
09-23-2010, 07:42 PM
fields #1

There is grey in the sky today;
fresh fruit and a sweet corn stand,
but I’m still afraid that
I’ll be alone when it starts to rain.

The woman at the stand is pretty,
but not what I expected,
not what I would think
a woman looks like
who works in a sweet corn stand
in the middle of a parking lot.

She is just selling something to me,
how am I supposed to know if her smile is
at me or my money,
at my heart or at my handsome sensibilities.

“It’s going to rain,” I want to say
you should cover up your tattoos,
they might fade away
might fall off and decay.

I know that the monkey hanging around your arm with a banana in it’s grasp isn’t going to fade away because of some rain. It will take years of sun and exposure and then it will still be there, only less.


I wish that the rain could wash away the streets and your silly corn stand
to leave you and me alone.

I would say jokingly
“Hey, where is the fresh fruit supposed to be?”

But it never rains.
The sky just stays grey,
and you keep selling corn,
and I keep a newspaper over my head just in-case.



fields #2

There is grey in the sky today
and with a quake in my bones
and a hung low feeling in my chest,
I wonder why I agreed to this.

We are not lovers or accomplices.
Nor are we secret buddies, whose
friendship we don’t want someone to see;
but we are two people who loved each other.

It is 3 o’clock now and you’re late;
just like a man to keep me waiting
to keep me down and to flood me with
sweet talk when I get mad.

We meet at an abandoned house
in a field with old corn stalks
rising up through the dirt and debris;
they’ve got their yellow but not their vitality.

You say that you’ve never felt this way
and I can’t help but feel used
can’t help but feel dirty.
Like a patch sewn into some bikers jacket.


I would read: Come here all who are weary, take the life that’s inside of me.


I think I heard that it might rain
today and not tomorrow,
or tomorrow and not today
I honestly can’t remember.

I really hope that it doesn’t
because I’ve got my purse with me
and I’ve got nothing to protect me.

Well there’s you but you don’t do much.



fields #3

There is grey in the sky today.


When you were 5 you asked
where the sky came from
and I said that I didn’t know
maybe you should find out for the rest of us.

Then when you were 9 you said
you figured it out and that God used
mirrors and a system of pulleys to
hoist it into place on the top of the world.

Your landlord said that you never left the building
never left even to shop for groceries
but only to check the mail
and look for letters from God.

Me and your father had corn on the cob
last week and I almost died laughing
when I remembered how amazing you thought
it was when you learned how popcorn was made.

You didn’t stop talking about it for a whole week afterwards.

But now you’re hanging on a piece of wood
with roots for feet and branches for hair.
They said it was gonna rain but I don’t
care, I just want you and not the tree.

hillwalker
09-24-2010, 04:45 AM
An interesting set of related poems - I like the way you add little descriptions, almost non sequiturs, into the main narrative of each piece. And the recurrent theme of the grey sky and fruitfulness of the fields maintains a certain underlying balance.

What I am not so keen on is the rather presumptuous prologue - if you have to instruct your readers how to approach your poems there's something fundamentally missing in them. You have to learn to let them speak for themselves, and if the reader fails to discover the inherent significance then so be it.....

H

twoheadedboy
09-24-2010, 08:27 AM
Ha, agreed on the prologue and edited.

angliholic
09-24-2010, 10:27 AM
This is a great poem!
I like the way you write your poem!

twoheadedboy
09-26-2010, 12:08 PM
Thanks, Angel. Much Appreciated.


What are some things I can improve on in this poem?

are there are sentences that confuse the reader rather than inform, stuff like that?

blank|verse
09-26-2010, 03:35 PM
This is largely an excellent poem, 2hb, which is quite ambitious and one of the better poems posted on the site of late. The repeated first lines of each section reminds me of Wallace Stevens's 'Sea Surface Full of Clouds'.

I think what is most impressive is the control of the lines which stops the piece getting too prose-like, which is always a danger with longer free verse poems. This is set out from the first line:

There is grey in the sky today;
Others, like

We are not lovers or accomplices.
It is 3 o’clock now and you’re late;
echo the balance of this first line very well and make for a well-controlled poem. I think I would like more lines in the poem to be similarly weighted, something that seems quite easy to achieve as the poem stands.

With that in mind, I don't understand the longer lines that randomly appear; they suggest you are just doing them as tricks to stop the reader getting bored, when there's really no need for them, as the piece is nicely narrated and readable as it stands.

All sections have odd line-breaks which I only find distracting. I think you should have the confidence in the words themselves and not feel you have to do anything with chopping and changing the line breaks for the sake of difference. See what you think to this section, realigned:

It is 3 o’clock now and you’re late;
just like a man to keep me waiting
to keep me down and to flood me with
sweet talk when I get mad.

We meet at an abandoned house
in a field with old corn stalks
rising through the dirt and debris;
they’ve got their yellow but not their vitality.
My least favourite section is the third, which tries to reach for 'something to say' and to conclude things nicely, which I don't think is needed and with poetry always prefer things not being said or wrapped up too nicely. It's a bit too traditional for modern tastes, generally speaking.

Still, it's an exceptional poem, enjoyably to read. Great stuff.

hack
09-28-2010, 12:46 PM
I like this a lot.
As BV already intimated, the piece strays toward prose
and is then artfully reigned in. Good work...peace...

symphony
09-28-2010, 03:42 PM
All of them are beautiful. I liked #1 most for its simplicity and honesty. It recounts a simple could-be-any-day and puts a music to that, reason why I love poetry. :)


“It’s going to rain,” I want to say
you should cover up your tattoos,
they might fade away
might fall off and decay.
Beautiful. :)

Now, as for improvements, I'm only a young shouldnt-call-myself-a-poet person, but here are my suggestions:

I almost liked #2 best but I thought it could sound a lot better with a bit of a revision. For example, although it sounds best as free verse and I wouldnt go for rhyme or meter in this kind of poems, but towards the end I thought I'm losing the poetry in the language on this one (esp in the last line). And as blank verse also mentioned, the odd line breaks dont help here. They are, I'd say unnecessary, if not distracting. And I think "and I can’t help but feeling used /can’t help but feeling dirty" sounds smoother as "and I can't help but feel used /can't help but feel dirty". You could also try revising the punctuations a bit for all three.

#3 is where I'm comfortable with the line breaks. The concept is great too. I loved the recollections put in it. Only suggestion is that I think something I was expecting from the poem was that it lose some of its more descriptive lines, for instance, I'd cut the first and last stanza from this one. Although I love the first line in all 3 of them, I felt like the line was forced into this one, and stanza 2-line 1 sounds just fine as an opening.

All in all, I love all of them but I think they all have the potential to sound a lot more effective if revised.

PrinceMyshkin
10-10-2010, 06:54 PM
I don't know what black spirit kept me from this before now (though it might have been your somewhat gruesome sounding nom de plume), but it is brilliant! Although Hill and B|V always have good reasons for their critiques, I am happy about each and every part of it.

No, wait, that's not entirely true: that first break from the regular length of the lines into the very long one, I didn't know what to make of that but I will certainly keep my eyes out for anything else you post.