Flight 323, January 68 - Affair of Desires

[ShadowsCool]

Flight 323, January 68

The feeble sun crawls on my skin
An ironic presence met with muffled voices as I disembark...
Pan Am flight 323, JFK, in and out of consciousness.
January 68, all I know, a female voice blurs out something on the intercom, interrupting the Beatles, Hello Goodbye,
somewhere another world away, rushed around on route some hospital stay
Away from Vietnam.

All I had known, God and the pledge of allegiance, a tight knit family
And proud smiles on my journey, for a country, for a flag;
Meeting up and disillusioned by maggots and mud sloshed feet,
Hardened by all I saw, with friends blown away, gone in thin air
To where?

The operating room lights jump at me
As blood spurts through me with reckless speed.
How ironic, a pleasant female voice spills through the intercom: emergency!
Interrupting my drug induced dream.
City General, tag 323, somewhere in and out of my mind.
January 68, nothing I care to know, laid on a hospital bed
Away from any semblance of sanity.

~


Affair of Desires

My warmest blooded woman
Her supple pair of fleshly moons
Rubs against the fantasy of my mind.

Her fully loaded lip
Spindles soft against my closest desire
As she prepares her stove.

Rubbing self against self
She molds her hands on me
To jettison me into a portion of her soul.

There I visit her cove
An Invite to come meet
Her sweet tasting honey.

She glides against the skin of my pores
Tipping me over, unleashing my hot streams
Into her slippery inlet.

~

[hillwalker]

The second poem first -

loved the second stanza - though I'm wondering where her 'stove' enters into it. Are we talking a metaphorical 'stove' - a source of heat - or an actual wood burning stove? If the former I think it's too huge a jump for the reader to make - most would be picturing the latter...

...and given that the word 'cove' appears later I'm wondering how much that word made up your mind for you to choose 'stove' rather than 'fire', for example, which lends itself to wider interpretation.

Other than that minor point, there are one or two cliches that tend to weaken the impact - 'fleshy moons' and 'sweet tasting honey' could have been picked from any number of top shelf magazines. But it's an interesting piece that I think you would do well to explore more.

The first poem was a more difficult read - mainly because there are so many gaps in the narrative that beg to be focussed on more - and so much extraneous detail that detracts from the obvious trauma of arriving back on home turf having experienced Nam. I love the snapshot images - the Beatles track, the two intercom voices interrupting the drug-induced dream. You perhaps need to make more of these hallucinatory experiences.

'friends blown away, gone in thin air' and 'blood spurts through me with reckless speed' are very powerful lines and stand out among the prosaic detours.

This cries out for a rewrite - you've got the raw material - it's just a case of refining it and tightening some of the images so that they stand out more clearly.

H

[ShadowsCool]

Hillwalker,

Thanks for pointing that out. My poems are inconsistent. Some good lines mixed in with cliche's that weaken the whole effect. The 323 piece is basic snapshots of a narrative but I see it needs more filling in. I appreciate you reading them over and giving me your opinion. It certainly will help me in the revision process.

Shadows