one of natures little slicking slidings
holding up—neglect—in a facial womb
constant lubricating iller tidings:
our blood-red love beneath a swollen moon.
in passion|terse excitement|overwhelm
the lips foam with speckling spray of over
wrought,wreaked,worked,willed
wills that(ever)over reach
and leave dry tongue their only testament.
a nimbler ink than i would drift to tact;
description of its so-much baser use
as orgy-water-wine that whets the lips
of both the goddess and the god consort
(for as above so too below in this
nether realm of swamp-like humidity—
or if so choose, eden-esque serpenity
where the only fall is to fail to fill
the aching chasm our dancing mouth-serpents
were born to aim to please)
but i neglect—
this little power, surging through our(oh)
lie-filled-teeth-encrusted gums to set us
afire—the paradox of liquid flame.
at end of days, all said in jest(or not)
withers on the palette as life fades away.
in bone-dry emptiness we’re left to rot
and mouths—as mouths are wont to do—to clay.
this is my very favorite thing. i love your damp swampy saliva writing. it works as a sexy thing, in a very unique way. A+ kid.
yay! a comment! i am glad you liked it. i think sometimes my best writing comes when given an absurd topic and forced to write on it. otherwise i wind up just doing wangsty romantic crap anyway.
so, since i do apparently have at least one reader, i have some questions of content. i usually wrastle with these decisions on my own, and either make changes or not. i’d like to try something new here though, to get some input. i warn you, this will be much longer than the poem, and probably boring, so skip it if you’re just reading the poetry.
so, as you may or may not notice, i like to play with couplets and then drop out of a rhyming scheme entirely for a bit, and then usually end with a heavy-handed couplet. more and more i seem to have pentamic lines, and they are nearly always iambic. so that’s this poem, formally, in a nutshell. my questions are mostly around the places where i intentionally break my own form, to try to jar the reader, or to try to create some sort of sensation. sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes i’m not sure.
so, input.
firstly: in the second stanza, i am considering putting an (over) before testament on the last line, so it would read: “and leave dry tongue their only (over)testament”. it does a number of things i like, so before anyone jumps on me for it not /meaning/ anything, listen to my reasoning. in the first, it completes the redundency of ‘over’ in that stanza, to make it very clear it is intentional — which of course it is. it makes it so every line (lines three and four being one line, in truth) uses over: overwhelm, of over, over reach, and (over)testament. in the second, it adds a full iamb over the normal pentameter the poem has going, which i think might be necessary since the previous line has a hanging syllable. as it is it sounds somewhat truncated to my ear because it is shorter than the previous line. the ‘over’ seems to round it out.in the third, and related to the first, it sort of negates the ‘only’, which in contrast to all of the overs sounds a bit out of place. maybe that’s just me. so, i’m curious what people think of that.
secondly: the line “of both the goddess and the god consort” is meant to fall a bit flat, to sort of finish the stanza before we go into a long tangent. all the words are chosen to be a bit muffled, so there isn’t the same hill-valley thing going on that the rest has. problem is, i’m wondering if it doesn’t fall too flat. i mean, it could go up rather than down as something like, “of both the goddess and her lover tongue” which has sort of a fun comparison to “mother tongue”, or maybe “of both the goddess and her lover’s drip” which fits the liquid theme. anyway, my point is that i was trying something intentional with the flatness, but could easily change it to something that would read as well (arguably better, lover’s drip is growing on me), so am curious what people think.
thirdly: two lines lower than that, “nether realm of swamp-like humidity” feels a bit wrong to me. part of it is the word ‘humidity’, which just sucks in the meter of the poem, but it is the right word for the place, and i can’t see using anything else. i think maybe adding another ‘this’ to the beginning (which would both make a repetition of ‘this’, and leave a hanging syllable in the line) of the sentence might fix the weird feel. thoughts?
fourthly: third line from the bottom of that stanza, there is a trailing (oh), both to round out the pentameter, but more to put a break there. what do people think of breaks like this? they are sound interjections, and i like them, but i’m wondering how they read to others (especially on paper, not out loud).
fifthly: the end. what do people think of that last couplet? i have a habit of doing these faux-profound final rhyming couplets in (mostly) iambic pentameter, just because it feels so right to me. is that just because i read too much hoity-toity poetry and secretly want to wear a corset? would it be better to end abruptly, or at least to keep the same flow of poem going? to me it feels like an epilogue, which i sort of like, but i’m wondering (again) what other people think.
okay, so those are some of the thousands of little bits i contemplate every time i spew words down on a page. i’m curious to see whether anyone has any feedback on them.
love
b
Hm.
I think you should wear a corset. Just for me.
i like adding (over) it frames it nicely, and sounds a bit smoother.
i actually like the second point as is, but “lover’s drip” is most definately a little naughtier.
nether realm of swamp like humidity. it sounds a bit blunter to me than the rest of the poem, but i like it for itself in a strange way. it seems somehow heavier than the rest of the poem. i can’t decide, really.
the trailing oh, i like out loud, but i always have a little problem with written out sounds.
i like the end, but i admittently am not as good at these things.
love to you.