Poetry / The Expiration Date
Lights are lies.
I’m dissolving into alabaster
walls: just a bunch of plastic wrappers
on a pornographic floor,
a stream that fissures,
clouds itself out, evaporates. I’m afraid to sweat
across the monkey bars, my sockets petrified
in Nebraska’s morning breath.
My jesting betrays my anxiety.
I crowd my sills with wrinkled
voices: I’m desperate every day
for human transactions,
to slip into the greasy social glove.
My loneliness, my loose-leaf snare, melts
and spills from my windows, forming
rivulets on my rabid streets. One by one, observe:
the smiles I’ve adored dwindle
into backs.
The moisture of the living grows arid
daily. We’re strippers: our white chocolate bones
peek through our glassy membrane
negligees.
We’re rolling bubbles. We expect
to evade the pot. Our glitter’s
bleached in patient sunlight.
Do we even have time to edit?
In déjà vu intersections, our wet plans
peek through transparent skin,
solarized. I know now: I mistook my ignorance
for acceptance.
An earthquake on the high dive, I interrogate the suns:
Could a being actually die?
Jesus says—
“You’ll shudder forever‿—
but we ooze lies like feces.
In widow’s weeds I wander.
I’m mourning at once
all my truants
and all of my incipient ghosts.
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I don’t have any notes for change.
This is pretty solid.
Good use of poetic devices
theme:
moisture/water/wetness, sexuality/physicality, falseness,
metaphor:
“incipient ghosts”
simile:
“we ooze lies like feces”
imagery:
“greasy social glove”
Every line is a well crafted phrase that has its own integrity and coexists with other lines/phrases to create a very distinct and deliberate composition.
lady, you’ve leveled up.
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Love the imagery like “Nebraska’s morning breath” and “the smiles I’ve adored dwindle into backs”. Do I sense a little possessive insanity with all the my, my my? I’m not sure if you should change the we’s to I’s to stay consistent. This part pulls away from the rest of the piece, since it comes on rather sudden, when no one else has really been introduced. Or, put it in quotes as if you said it. Solid voice and tone throughout. Nice job.
Interesting phrase:”our white chocolate bones”
The words in the start are like a video in my mind.
The ending is very dark: ”shudder forever…ooze lies like feces…widow’s weeds I wander….mourning…ghosts.”
The combining of religious figures and feces has a significant shock effect.
The world you create has more than one sun to interrogate.
Good use of imagery, that is the big strength of this piece. The last stanza is a good pop to the reader but the few lines above it throw the poem off. I think that it is just the paragraphing. There isn’t much in those sentences that seem like they need to make the reader stop and take more notice of them then the rest. Maybe I haven’t figured out the meaning of the sentences but it still is something to look at. Good job overall.
At first I didnt know where you were taking me as a reader with this piece. Which is a good thing because it forces you to read on. The writing had a very advanced selection of words which helped alot with the descriptions. I liked how it shows that all people are the same, even strippers have deep and meaningful thoughts.
I find starting new lines for “walls” and then for “voices” to be a bit too awkward, distracting me as I try to read the piece. There are a few images I really like, such as “across the monkey bars, my sockets petrified/in Nebraska’s morning breath.” and, “or human transactions,/to slip into the greasy social glove.” But over all I am not really feeling the piece. It’s vague, and it doesn’t all flow, but it does offer a lot of innovative images.
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