Who Do You Think you Are?

[vagantes]

From a casual by-blow that casually produced
This scrap of nerves and blood now hurtling toward nothingness.

My mother a pneumatic bottle-blonde met two strangers
In the downstairs bar of an hotel - called The Dive.
With them on skyscraper heels she tottered to their van,
(Being furniture removers) and on a stranger's bed,
Surrounded by scraps of other people's lives,
She surrendered, not unwillingly, to their pleasure.

Whether it was the first thrust that engendered me,
I know not, neither do I care.
More likely sloppy seconds or perhaps a co-mingling,
But there I was some nine months later.

And now after three score years and ten,
It would appear my death will be as inconsequential as my birth.

[smerdyakov]

Very much pithy and dark matter here, V.
The second verse is definitely the strongest, for me. It has some very strong imagery in it, "...skyscraper heels she tottered...".
"The Dive" is also a nice touch.

[cafolini]

Too much finality for one argument among infinite. Some nice poetical lines. The title is defiant without a lot of meaning. The circumstantial random value of birth and death is well taken and meaningful.

[Charles Darnay]

There seems to be a bit of a clash in styles going on here:

"My mother a pneumatic bottle-blonde met two strangers
In the downstairs bar of an hotel - called The Dive.
With them on skyscraper heels she tottered to their van," = beat poetry style

and then you have phrases like "I know not." and "Three score and ten" which don't fit.

The poem itself is quite good - I like the simplicity of it given the subject matter.

[Jack of Hearts]

Well, that was uplifting.

This reader thought the middle (about the mother) was the best.





J

[hillwalker]

The title says it all. I also found the stylistic inconsistencies rather strange and unnecessary - unless you are suggesting you have become more archaic with age. But I'm guessing not.

There are a couple of other points you might also consider

- 'casual' and 'casually' in the opening line is a little weak,

- and you might be better inserting a comma after 'them' in line 5 unless it was the men who were 'on skyscraper heels'.

H

[vagantes]

The title refers to a television programme fashionable in the UK which reflects an obsession with ancestry. It always seems to me that such interests indicate a need to compensate for a personal sense of inadequacy. There is as well an ambivalence in the expression which can be taken as a challenge or even a wide eyed expresiion of need.

With regard to stylistic quirks, I see no obvious divergences.

One of the casuals should have been causal.

[firefangled]

I find this far more interesting than the TV program (we have one similar here). The producers here would do well to periodically entertain less pat origins in someone's ancestry.

I'm not sure I like the double negative "not unwilling," but I remain open to it, choosing to think it adds, somehow, to the ad-hoc nature of this encounter and its environment.

Interesting above all criticism. Thanks for sharing.

[vagantes]

Not unwillingly I see appears in a translation of a mediation from Marcus Aurelius.

It was meant to be a use of a litotes ie an understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by its contrary, denied by a negative.

The example most commonly given is "not bad" meaning more or less good, which has resonance with my usage.