Dirty Fingernails
my dirty fingernails are:
purply-black ash
on Holocaust beaches;
fossil beds for
a rashing Thought;
bad french
tips from Nostradamus;
a fanned gamut of
flat-Earth ends;
and all of this matters
only to a mother.
---------------------
p.s. my fingernails aren't really dirty :)
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7 comments:
purply... brilliant word :)
You really have a definitive voice running through your works. I like all the images presented, except for the bad french tips from Nostradamus line... I don't know why, but the word flow just irks me in some way. The rest is beautiful, tho.
Kudos
i love that you have 5 couplets--like fingers. love especially the ending (tho i'll bet it also matters to customers in a restaurant) and the lines:
a fanned gamut of
flat-Earth ends;
i'm with bm--either flow issue or just poem seems still a little underdone. fingers need joining to a palm (theme) unless you are just going for five fanciful images.
by the way, good internal rhyme. love that.
hmmm, brad that's strange cuz i thought the "bad french tips from Nostradamus" was the coolest one haha.
to me, it is one of my best puns.(is the pun even noticeable?)
i understand what you mean by the flow though, i'll try and change it so it fits.
and janice, since you mentioned that line, would you like
"gamut fanned" better than "fanned gamut"?
i think the former would flow better phonetically. just tryin to tinker with the flow.
i'm always a little suspicious of reversed word order, but i use it sometimes. i think either is fine--slightly prefer original.
by "bad french tips" do u mean nostradamus's foretellings--that have come true or haven't? i know who he is, but couldn't quite get your meaning there. wouldn't be surprising , tho, if i missed it out of sheer denseness.
what did u think of my comment that the poem needs to use those fingers to grab us by the throat and shake us til we get what u are saying? does it quite do that much or is it just a handshake?
yea the foretellings was the implied part of the pun, but it's a play on "french tips":
http://www.nails-in-preston.co.uk/testpics/french.JPG
"what did u think of my comment that the poem needs to use those fingers to grab us by the throat and shake us til we get what u are saying? does it quite do that much or is it just a handshake?"
hmm, the main idea
was to elevate an image to sheer
absurdity and then at the end
comment on the image like it was
still a normal image, and thus
by implication the comment would
kinda mean a lot more than it
should.
do you think it does that well?
i can't really tell cuz i already
know what it's supposed to be
doing.
I caught the pun (although, honestly, I didn't like it)...
I think the ending would wrap up the poem better if you used a less-vague line instead of "and all of this matters"... the "all of this" is very broad, very vague and you almost have no control over what the read attributes "all" to mean. What do you think about something like:
and all these imperfections
matter only to a mother
?
maybe?
It's your poem, use w/e wording you like
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