Invisible Pain

[miyako73]

He suddenly pulled and pushed me
Onto the salt, thorns of the sea,
Caustic and sharp, stings of a bee,
But he loved me, my soul, my body.

The salt melted in my fresh blood,
The cuts I prayed and got from god-
Dead-deaf, dead-blind to what I had,
From birth to death, all bad, all sad.

The next ordeal from the pantry:
Raw green lentils, beans of coffee,
Rolling, bouncing towards my knee
Still on the floor of sweat and pee.

The beans softened in my cold sweat
That left my face shaking and wet,
While he, my man, went out to get
Pebbles and rocks, my doom all set.

Mine is the pain you will not see
In these awful rhythms of glee,
In these rhymes, beat, monotony
Worse than a child's play poetry.

[Silas Thorne]

Wow, I love this poem, so I keep returning to it. I don't know why though, yet. Perhaps it's the puzzle of the thing for me, or the harsh imagery. Anyway, I'll say more when I have more thoughts together on it.
The rhyme seems to have a kind of Middle English flavour to me. I don't know why either.
Lines that really jumped out at me, perhaps due to surprise, are: 'bounding toward my knee/ still on the floor of sweat and pee'
Comes across as emotionally raw while excellently crafted. Wonderful contrasts.

[miyako73]

Thanks for reading. This is actually a parody that shows how forms can obscure contents- images, meanings, emotions, narratives. This could be more powerful in free verse. I just want to illustrate the limitation of formalism. Imagists show, formalists tell.

[MorpheusSandman]

Imagists show, formalists tell.WHERE do you come UP with this stuff? :out: I've got to love the theory, though, that writing intentionally bad formal verse shows how all formal verse is bad and how awesome all free-verse is! :lol: Oh, and the DELICIOUS irony that you have another poster, who's not in on the joke, saying how great the intentionally bad parody is! Oh, man, the hilarity, it hurts! I'm going to have to try this!

Touche, I say! (http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=68973)

[Silas Thorne]

Does this mean that this is a nonsense poem? Oh well, I thought there was some more thinking behind it. I rather liked many of the lines, well, apart from 'my doom all set', and can't really understand why you would bother writing a poem that you thought would be better in free verse in another form here. If it has some meaning to you and you think it would be better expressed in another fashion, why not write it in that fashion?
I think formal verse forms have limitations, and freedoms, but so does 'free' verse. I'm not really interested in taking up an Ism and fighting with you about it away from the poem, since to me all tools have their uses, and are used for different jobs.

[miyako73]

Nope, it's a poem I wrote and edited many times.

[Silas Thorne]

Well then sorry, I can certainly see some connection between the grains of salt, the peas, and the beans, and there seems a possible religious interpretation for me, but I still don't understand why the floor has 'sweat and pee'. Is that what you mean by rhyme, a formal aspect, affecting your meaning? Forced by the need to agree with the rhymes for 'pantry', 'coffee' and 'knee', you then throw in a homonym for 'pea'?
Anyway, the poem still intrigues me.

[miyako73]

Someone mocked the "illogical sense" of this poem. Well I spoke for myself when I wrote this one. There's honesty in this poem. That's how I feel about the limitation of formalism as far as I'm concerned. If you want to mock free verse, do it with honesty. Show how it limits you, then maybe I'll take you seriously.

Beats, rhymes, monotony are all sounds. Aren't sounds for the hearing? I don't wanna hear, I want to see. Show me images instead.

[Silas Thorne]

:smile5: