maxim
Feed me a slug
and I’ll mutter,
depending on
what the dew point
dares to dredge from
fallowed miasma and
hangdog dogwood blossoms,
some scrubbed box-top shibboleth,
tickling, life was hard and people
surprise you, hangnail plastic
burs disturbing a blistered
stencil’s bored out breast
plate pressed to the
shipwrecked sun—see,
all of it crimped in an i or an r
as the iron inters some scar
or impartible clue in the ox-
ford shirt’s scrunched cuffs
or the dandering hackles that
dandle the screw-stripped neck
to deflect, and redundant as
floundering rounds of a
frowning or yowling clown ruff,
frisson, cathexis, wobbling
novelty—see,
where the stars still barb all the
eigengrau baleen sweeping
eternity clean, where the
mold means less than
death’s suggestion:
sunlight licking some slug trail lean
as eternity, shy as a limelight, summons this
scattershot caterwaul aura up sulking sills
and the seam-ripped bluebells beckoning
everything back, as the knock-
kneed whale wraps rapturous,
season-slow song along throttling
furlongs, throngs of foam-
fraught, seamless sea
suspended in
bristling
music—
3 thoughts on "maxim"
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Some very nice imagery. I love this:
hangdog dogwood blossoms,
nice repetition of “dog.” There’s a name for that in the Poetry Dictionary, but it escapes me at the moment. LoL
Great repetition of the “B” sound, and I really like the way you separated “breast” and “plate,” getting dual use out of “breast.” Nicely done!
But I wonder, is there more than one poem here? Or should segments be numbered with Roman numerals? Just a thought.
Thank you! I appreciate all the things you noticed, especially the breast/plate split! I’m glad that came through. As per parsing it out into sections; I feel like that certainly has its place, and I appreciate the suggestion—I’ve been told that slippery clarity of meaning and potential overwhelm are, perhaps, significant pit falls in my poetry, and parsing it out could potentially resolve either or both of those hurdles; however, I feel like with this piece at least sections might break up too abruptly what I want to feel like a fluid and even hypnotic stream of sentiments, sounds, and images. To me, this poem is about what a poem can ultimately propose, from the poles of maximic wisdom to pure, almost irrational music. It’s also growing from the image of a slug (of course, also suggesting a false coin here) to a whale, and I feel like bracketing that transformation with segments could potentially (how many times can I mutter potential here…) disrupt, even hinder that.
I do appreciate the suggestion though. It’s made me comb through the poem a good bit more. I had initially written it without even stanza breaks, which felt overwhelming even for me.
I don’t I’d break it into multiple poems though. It’s not particularly long, maybe breaking across a second page. What’s more, I’m at home with reading poems of this length. There’s a part of me that even writes them rebelliously long (which is silly), if only to go against the grain of bite-sized poetry. I’m not opposed to bite-sized poetry in any respect. When it’s done well, it’s immaculate. Maybe one day, when page-long poems are all the rage, I’ll pare things down to plump and succulent couplets. I also like to get a little lost and confused in my writing. It ensures that it remains interesting for me when i revisit it, like noting new things in a Polaroid every time I peel it out of the scrap book.
I don’t think I’d break it*