This is a sentimental poem.
A love poem without a lover,
an erotic poem without a bed.
A love poem that seeks the ideal
not of the perfect body but the ideal
of finally meeting someone of silence
interrupted by light affirmative confession.
Please do not forgive this sweet conceit
on my part, the soul is lonely for its lover.
I seek him still more than ever.
Nothing catches on the nets of my love yet.
I seek him still more than ever.
His body and my body in answer
to each other. I seek him anonymous lover
as yet untouched, unknown.
I seek him and he seeks me
but we know not each other.
3 comments:
Two thoughts, three really, but only two about your blog: firstly, I think I must be a long way from passion because so much here felt alien to me, not your fault but just an observation; secondly, the paragraph beginning "This is a sentimental poem..." is worth looking at AS a poem and would be worth spending a bit of time on, and, lastly, for my tastes the poem is too long - and it feels a little self-indulgent (but then I guess that's implied in your introduction) - but the opening stanza I liked and I would probably cut it there myself.
Hello Jim,
Alien to you? - What such a desperate description of 'passion'? So passionate as to become unrealistic?
Obviously, as you are not of homosexual inclination it will seem rather alien to you. Understandable.
I think you might be write about the paragraph being turned into a poem. This poem meanders too much and I have perhaps already said what I wanted to say in one of two stanzas, everything else needs cut.
It's hard to know when to stop and where to cut.
The 'alien' comment was just an observation about how less passionate I've become over the years; it really takes a lot to get me excited these days. I read poems and I listen to songs and I watch films and I keep waiting for something to excite like the first time I heard The Velvet Underground or the first time I saw a Magritte painting or the first time I saw Waiting for Godot.
The homosexual aspect of the piece was neither here nor there; love is love and desire is desire - I've been there so although I don't understand the object of the desire I do understand its nature.
As for when to stop and where to cut... Put the poem aside for a few weeks, forget about it and then see how it strikes you when you pick it up again. You're too close to the work to be objective at the moment.
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