Quote:
Originally Posted by
Haunted
Prince, thanks for the thumbs up. I agree, I had trouble with the tenses from the getgo. Any suggestions?
You could narrate it in the present tense all the way through. Why not? But if you have objections to that, any of the following are places where a switch from past to present would be less obtrusive:
walking out I wonder...
The switch would work here because of the shift from simply carrying out an action, to the self-consciousness of the line that immediately follows.
Or you could do it here:
I have no insurance
no next of kin
he said it don’t matter
where the anxiety of being uninsured comes to the surface, in which case "he said it don't matter" should become he says it doesn't matter and off you go for the rest of the poem