Reflections on the puddle of life

The imagery in this was extremely powerful. I loved it.

'people bubbling out of bars
like champagne from an open bottle,'

may have been my favourite line.

Sometimes it hard to labor on a post/blog/poem and bare your heart and soul and perhaps feel overlooked in the hurley burley of internet life. I'm the last to qualify as a judge of poetry as I am endlessly mantraing but I felt your quiet despair in the city--I'm no great fan of them either but hang in there. I firmly believe a writer should write for themselves first and then display his wares and seek not the glory of affirmation or even condemnation or else the soul dies daily in so many slow degrees. Hang in there . With respect. I liked it for what it was.

Unlike Becca, I had trouble with the lines re champagne because the latter is so fixed in my mind as a symbol of gaiety & celebration so I had great trouble moving from there to the guts being spilled in the gutter. But the rest of this! Oh, the rest of this! I hope you don't intend, in revising, to make it less raw... It's you moving in a new direction, in life, perhaps, but assuredly in your poetry, a less stately (?) direction, less firm-footed but more candid and revealing.

I'm with mtspur about writing, well said. As far as your poem, I sense it's observant, disinterested, somber, maybe even wistful. You've gathered up the landscape as a mere onlooker, wistful in your method, moving about at your own pace, taking in, not offering charity, taking none. What the speaker finds, on one level, is that we're all connected by nothing. That's a bit melancholy, but fair enough. That's not the whole picture---that is, what the poem is 'about.' For me, it's about the walk---the walk that grinds like an old egg beater. In my opinion, effervescent and bubbling used in the same stanza is close enough in meaning to be repetitive. The same with 'bleak,' 'dark,' 'nothing,' 'black,' 'night.' and 'unnatural light.' Overkill.
It broke down for me midway, in a fundamental sense-- being able to marry one's superficial experience with the inner world of the character, when in fact what I sense is that the speaker herself acknowledges they're both superficially the case. Maybe that's the point. I dunno.

I forgot to mention that my favorite line is "pricked here and there with points of light". Light has done that to me on many nights walking.

Hey, thanks guys I'm not feeling neglected or anything I'm just not sure that the forums are the place, perhaps a feeling of 'if people want to read they can read here, but if they don't, they don't' kind of thing. I entirely agree with you mtpspur on your views on writing, we write principally for ourselves, we share if we want to and if it touches someone then that's an added bonus. I think you 'get' poetry more than you let on Thanks Jon, as always, for your honest views - I appreciate it, really; and Prince, and Becca of course.