Poetry / How It Begins
You’re in a club near closing and you can’t recall ever being
this messed up. But then you’re dying of inoperable cancer
so no one’s going to expect you to take this well. You haven’t
slept in sixty-some hours but the ephedrine keeps you head clear.
You want to remember the beginning this time. Starting here
is like being born all over again--the harsh light, noises and images
you can’t yet comprehend. You don’t understand where you are,
but this will be a perpetual condition. This is how it begins.
After the doctors confirmed their prognosis of a malignant,
brain tumor, you returned to your apartment, curled in bed
and stared into space. Sometime later, you ate a sandwich.
When you started feeling sleepy, you walked a mile
to the drugstore. Three days later, you’ve made arrangements
to visit your family, called the only two friends who deserve
to know, tendered your resignation, donated a closet of clutter
and finished six paintings started and abandoned over the years.
Several hours ago you showered, dressed handsomely and came here
to your favorite club to talk to a girl you’ve wanted to meet.
She smiled politely but went her way. You feel hurt, rejected, but that
isn’t going to kill you. Nine months, the doctors said,
give or take a couple of weeks. Nearing 2am as others crowd the bar,
you finally move to dance. Is this how you’ve come to live,
waiting for that last call, that insight, that inspiration, that something
terrible in your head reminding you that you’re going to die?
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Actually, this does a lot more in the poetic space than it would in prose. If you want to see long metered lines, look at C.K. Williams. Now, his line length annoys me. My favorite line here is “Sometime later you ate a sandwich.” This pieces is full of seemingly random details that are held together by poetic tonality and intentionality.
I really enjoy the last call ending. It somehow reminds me of Eliot’s “Wasteland.”
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Quite honestly, I didn’t like this piece. I don’t feel that it should’ve been under the “poem” genre, seeing as it didn’t flow or have the rhytym of a poem, and the meters were much too long to seem like poetry. This almost could be a nonfiction work, and I think it would work better as more of a story or an account, just lengthened, and more detail put in; paragraphing etc.
very intense and insightful, personally its a bit of a wake up call to me, i really liked all of it exept for the end, it seems a little incomplete,
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