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Ghetto Dusk
Surreptitious through the ghetto dusk,
avoiding arousing the vagabonds in sheets, gypsies,
scattered and sprawled on the sidewalks.
The mumbling of mind-altered men and women,
insomniac cave creatures, causes my skin
to tremble as if in treachery. They sin too.
Decisions create Destiny. Speed to be free.
My bag of groceries, fruit and wine, rustle
in the freezing silence. Become a ghost, none
better know the pathway home alone. Mistakes
always potentially made, by the stimulation
and hysterical excitement of newfound experience.
Like a child knowingly vulnerable, relax in faith.
This is a beautifully eerie
This is a beautifully eerie poem. The sense of unease and terror is spread evenly throughtout the lines, and even newfound experience becomes a trigger of histeria. The speaker even advises the listener/reader/visitor to the ghetto to become a ghost, which is usually a cause of terror but, in this case, becomes a strategy for avoiding terror.
But then, in the last line, you do another one of your excellent slam-stop strategies, and show the relaxation of fear that is an effect of faith---some with which many of us, with which I personally, can identify with, and to which we can honestly attest.
At this stage in my experience of your poems, I am convinced that you are combining the verbal skill and innovations of the great Symbolist poets (Mallarme, especially, comes to mind) with an almost casual and conversational contemporary style. That your style acknowledges one of the greatest styles of the nineteenth century while remaining firmly planted in the twenty-first century is one of its primary and most powerful attractions.
Starward
Brightest Star in the Sky
You are so attentive it's baffling. And not only that, but you are capable of connecting the most profound intricacies of intellectual observation into a summary of perfect precision. You blow me away with your level of knowledge and ability to respond with correct, confident notices and detailed thoughts into coherent flow. While I'm here, I should say that I have never read Mallarme, or any of the Symbolists you frequently mention and compare my work to. As a matter of fact, my library is honestly quite limited, T.S. Eliot being one of the only poet's I've studied and therefore an easy self-acclaim for being among my greatest inspiration.
bananas are the perfect food
for prostitues
Thank you for your kind
Thank you for your kind response, and the compliment. But honesty compels me to state, for the record, that any attentiveness I bring to the poem is because the poem's greatness compels that attentiveness. On postpoems, I read far more than I comment on, because I find that the "far more" are not as inspiring as the few. As for Eliot, he was the first poet I studied obsessively, although, after two years, I transferred that study to the poetry of Wallace Stevens. What I like about the symbolists---Mallarme, Eliot, Stevens; or the Russian symbolists before the Revolution---is their skill in causing abstraction to fuse with mundane reality. You have that skill as well. Thus, when I read your poems, I already know that I will have a great reading experience---and to that, I must always be attentive. Thanks again for the kind response, and for the excellence of your poems.
Starward