These are very flattering: These are very flattering remarks, Starward. If it turns out as you have predicted, for even one individual out there, then it was doubly worth penning. Much gratitude.
Wow! What a reading: Wow! What a reading experience. I cannot speak to the situation that inspired this poem, rather its provenance is real or fictive, or if it expresses obliquely truths circumstances that are known only to the Poet. Therefore, I can only respond as an ordinary reader, and my comments are meant with the utmost respect as I proceed.
I love eerie poems. I think T. S. Eliot's great eerie poem, The Hollow Men, probably awakened that tendency in me. I get bogged down in prose ghost stories, especially the Britishm because they move so slowly; hence a poem, which both compresses and enegrizes both time and space, strikes me as a better venue for a haunted tale. And this poem, this magnificent "The Re-do. Misplaced," compresses and enegrizes time and space perfectly. And the title itself has a very eerie implication to it, compelling the reader to begin to enter the poem.
And with all the elegance of a British ghost story, this poem proceeds with ordinary language which one would hear at any dinner gathering, or a visit with friends, or perhaps echoing through a bus or train in public transporation. The grammar is not broken, or wrenched, or convoluted. The mounting eerieness appears in the way the lines are phrased, I will not quote them all because, if you are reading this, you have already read them; so I will cite just one example, the second line "glisten in your brooding eyes." That line refers to the previous line, a description of skies, and skies do glisten (and I love it when they do, rather that is in my window, or in a poem I am reading). But these skies glisten in "brooding eyes," and brooding is word freighted with the potential to become either haunted or haunting. This is how so many of the Poet's words in this poem operate. Ordinary words, perfectly set in ordinary grammar, and yet, the Poet has put just a little sharper edge on them than would be ordinarily heard.
But what, after all, is a haunted house? It is an ordinary building, sturdy, a structure built as well as its architect could design or its construction crew could raise up. Yet, there is something else in there. This poem is like a haunted house. It is built very well, it has a inviting format, it reproduces ordinary human conversation. The best poems always do that: one could describe Vergil's great epic, The Aeneid, like that. Or The Hollow Men. Yet, there is something in those poems, as in this poem, that is "other," and, as the poem proceeds, not only "other" but "eerie," even "horrific."
To me, the two greatest British ghost stories are Bram Stoker's "The Judge's House," and Robert Aickman's "Pages From A Young Girl's Journal." In each of them, the language proceeds according to the common elegances of well written English, and, rather than the gross splatter and noisy chaos of American horror movies, the language itself becomes electrified with the very negative (but heavily compelling) charge or power that leads to the final horrific shock. This poem that Ssmoothie has give us takes its place righfully and successfully with those two pillars of eerie language.
I applaud the accomplishment demonstrated in this poem.
Thank you very much for your: Thank you very much for your perceptive and complimentary comment. Some years ago---perhaps more than a decade---a former member of PostPoems challenged me to write a poem in which would, in a short space, present an entire ghost story, with an implied backstory and a semse of dread and foreboding. I think . . . I hope . . . that this one might qualify to fulfill that challenge. Thanks again for your kind comment. I apologize for my dely in acknowledging it, I am very unwell right now.
Wow, just wow... and here i: Wow, just wow... and here i am in this lace saying I know every line like the writing on the walls of my brain. Hat off you! I like it! I like it alot! More than alot! Awesome write!
Great rant you can feel the: Great rant you can feel the powerful emotions at play and the despair. Pain often brings profound insights. I am so sad that you are feeling anything like this. Happiness is fleeting but better fleeting than not at all. If happiness lasted it woukd become mundane and none would want it. Its tough but I'm sure you are tougher. So glad to hear from you. Tight Hugss and prayerss always xx
Cue the surreal and menacing: Cue the surreal and menacing music . . .
Truly awesome, the clutching power you unleashed in this brilliantly terrifying lament written from the POV of the denizens of "There". The poem moves with a cleverly plodding, dirge-like cadence through increasing levels of "unrelenting, unchanging despair" until finally "There" becomes "Here".
The progression of horror is consuming because the gravity of the speakers' collective voice and the viewpoint put the reader right into the center of the ring. It's an immersive wordscape, an audacious poetic feat, a success.
Congratulations on this!