Break a stick
hit the earth
squeeze a sound
from your birth
Eat a monster
feed your pain
Kill a gangster
go insane
All these things I've left to do
Lead me endlessly to you
All these things I've left unsaid
Leave me crying in my bed
Take some dirt
make a pile
Build it higher
like a spire
Build it stronger
Build it taller
Keep on building
keep on building
All these things I've left to do
Lead me endlessly to you
All these things I've left unsaid
Leave me crying in my bed
 James Graham at 12:03 on 03 January 2014
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Hello, Arty, welcome to the group. Nice timing - it’s good to have a new member to start the new year.
I have to say right away that there’s something about this poem I can’t quite get my head round. So I’ll just float some ideas and impressions and you can put me right.
I like the form - the pattern you’ve set up, of short lines rhyming or repeating along with longer lines, also rhyming but striking a different note - a different mood. Everything in the short lines is kind of crazy: the first set suggests angry reactions, more in the mind than in reality - ‘Eat a monster’, ‘Kill a gangster’ - and the second seems to be about trying in a rather feeble way to make a new life, trying to build something out of dirt, something that will just collapse. The longer lines are more real - something bad has happened (more about that later) and there’s a lot of pain and grief. So the short-line sections speak in a different way from the long-line sections, which is always a sign that a poet knows how to use line length to good effect.
Another impression: this is like a song lyric. Is it a song? Do you see it becoming a musical number for performance?
Something I can’t decide: ‘You’ could be an ‘ex’, a former partner who has broken it off but the poem’s speaker is still in love. Or else ‘you’ is someone who has died. That’s suggested by the lines
All these things I've left unsaid
Leave me crying in my bed |
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Knowing there are things left unsaid, that never can be said, is often a part of grief, a recurring and tormenting thought that comes after a death.
The more I think about it, the more I think it’s a death that has happened - but I’m not a hundred per cent sure that’s what you mean.
One or two odds and ends that I need you to explain. I don’t get this at all:
squeeze a sound
from your birth |
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- the cry of a newborn baby? But why put this beside breaking a stick, eating a monster, and killing a gangster? It seems out of place.
Also the title. I don’t see a connection between the title and the poem, but suspect there is a real connection, maybe a very clever one, and I’m just being dumb about it.
So I hope you’ll get back to me so that we can discuss the poem further. It may possibly need a bit of revision, but it already has a lot to commend it and could be a really excellent piece.
James.
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 V`yonne at 15:37 on 05 January 2014
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For me (and I am not a fan of end rhyme) the rhyme is driving the poem maybe to say things that don't quite fit like
Kill a gangster
go insane |
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The beginning seems to go from birth and that is such a jump! But the title suggests maybe this is more for performance?
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James Graham at 15:49 on 05 January 2014
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Well, what was it the poet said about the 'troublesome bondage of rhyming'? (Milton.) The long lines rhyme very naturally, but I wonder if lines 1-8 would work better using repetition like the short lines further on, and avoiding end rhyme?
James.
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artyfenton 
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