To To Tango

[Bar22do]

Two To Tango

The villain grips her hand in his,
eyes meet and she swirls
towards blinding footlights,
on whispers that carry away.
An accordion gasps she’s his last -
she’s his latest line.

A jump to the bait and fate smiles,
“I’m the one and only”, but
unwary in her whirl she doesn't notice
his strings are attached to her limbs,
his wrists have the power.

On a roll for a day, or two,
the next she is a fallen star,
in defeat bleeding out
her threshed conceit, his yesterday's
deflated plaything.

Those strings, always lassoing, loosing,
lassoing...

[MorpheusSandman]

A rather gruesome piece that presents a nice paradox in which the confused syntax seems to sympathize with the girl's perspective, while also attempting to rise above it and comment on it... kinda like a drowning man gasps in those moments his head rises above the surface. That "but" cuts really hard, and everything after that seems to echo the disintegration of the "relationship", the disillusionment. I don't know if you need the last two lines though. In fact, I might slightly rewrite them as:

her threshed conceit, his yesterday's
deflated plaything

That last image is a powerful one to end the piece on.

[Bar22do]

Thank you Morpheus. This poem doesn't really sympathizes with the girl and it's a short-lived "relationship", based on interest in which only one is in control. I like your ending and might adopt it while I still need time to decide whether to scrap my last two lines....
Thanks a lot for your reading and suggestions!
Best regards,

Bar

[MorpheusSandman]

Perhaps "sympathizes" was the wrong word... I think there's a kind of whirlwind confusion to the images and syntax, which I think echoes the girl's feeling of being swept up in the moment. Yet, if anything, it is critical of this delusion. So it's sympathetic in form, perhaps, more than actual perspective.

[deryk]

I thought it had some nice demure deceits and phantasmagorical sweeps; both of which contributed strongly to the sense of the girl's delusion. Swirling accordion whispers and fake smiles and stardom references gave it this really fashionable intonation of dark manipulation. The only weakness I noticed was in the third stanza, "On a roll for a day, or two" seemed to be a big point of decompression for me; it sort of deflated the fashionable evil into a mode of mundane realism, like we were stepping out of the metaphor very abruptly. I really like the poem, but that intersection felt very much like a departure for some reason, almost like another poem addressing the original. The rest of the aftermath was good though. It was a must.

[AuntShecky]

This one reminded me of two rather disparate items. The first was the famous line by Yeats (though my memory being what it is, I'll have to paraphrase: "How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

The other thing is a much stronger memory of my childhood. We were the last people on the block finally to get a television, and the standard fare way back then consisted of variety shows, sort of update of Vaudeville. Every now and then one of the acts would be a tango but more frequently the Apache dance: with the male partner violent tossing his female partner across the stage. Naturally, this bothered my youthful sensibilities-- is he dancing with her or beating her up? That kind of tension and disturbing images also can be found in your poem.
cf. the line from Susan Sontag: "Real art has the capacity to make us nervous."

[blank|verse]

Hi Bar - I read this yesterday and was going to make comments about whether the poem had anything to do with this film (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022454/), and how the 'Ah' at the end of the poem reminded me of 'Days' by Philip Larkin (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178046). But now you've changed the poem, making both points redundant! Oh well. (And to be honest, I found the 'ah' a bit of a weakness anyway, and think the poem's better without it.)

The tone of the poem is hard to grasp and makes it slightly unsatisfactory for me - the cliche of the title and words like 'villain' put us in the realm of the fictional and so distance us from this being real, and therefore lose a bit of punch; but by the poem's end it feels like things are trying to be more serious, but I'm not sure.

(And Rilke's 'The Spanish Dancer' is the other poem I'm reminded of here...)

[Bar22do]

Well, the characters are life, not films, literature or poetry inspired, I'm afraid... it was all meant to be a metaphor (especially the dance and how it propelled the "victim" to the belief she's the centre of the world), but it didn't seem to have worked.
I love Larkin's "Days" whose "ah!", I guess, is in place, B/V... ah. BTW, where are your three geese!
Thanks for the time you devoted to this effort. I had several titles in a row, as I had names for the beast (an evil, a hypocrite, scoundrel, svengali, manipulator, villain... hoped I picked up the right one, but I did not...)
I'm grateful for your generous reading, deryk, as well as for detecting that dark manipulation. It's a poem that needs more work if it is worthwhile an effort at all. (I have a fat file filled with similar rants..)
And dear Auntie, it's the second time my demure effort is irritating for your eyes! But you have this great diplomatic gift which would almost make me believe this poem was an experience for you! Thank you for reminding of real art; my own has still such a long way to go before it has a chance to be called that... (well, this means I must exact longevity from my genes... while times are hard and the earth out of balance!)

Thank you all for reading and commenting,
best of all, Bar