that
each face coloring the bar
twins one
moved to another city
or served your father in his hospital bed
or stopped your calls
or lay with you naked and
promising
all
vanished
in magician's smoke
in magician's smoke
to be forgotten
remembered
doubted
seen again in 20 streets,
the strangers with that hair
jaw
voice
the shape of her
until
your grail's
the small curve of knee
the tilt of neck
the rarity
the new you can not quick.
until.
A fair amount of editing here, scrawled at a bar on two pieces of paper... by the version posted here, more words crossed out than included.
ReplyDeleteTrouble with editing, it doesn't guarantee me a polished product - as I edit much the way I write, listening to the words and cutting or adding or changing them to sound right, in a rushed stewing.
ReplyDeleteDon't go for 'polished' Go for bang! or slice or tickle or choke or
ReplyDeleteThis one is good!
ReplyDeleteMaybe polished isn't the word. "finished"... not in the sense of complete, but, attended to, crafted.
ReplyDeleteThat doesn't happen when all my drafts are rough drafts - the edits are just new rounds of rough drafting over the old rough draft.
I'm ok with it, but if I'm interested in range, which I am, I'll need to also do some editing that's careful, one of these days.
I met a moment today. Why post public what is private, by virtue of being unread? That no one sees these posts, renders them quiet acts, private and hidden, but I pretend in each posting to open myself, and my work, to public engagement, scrutiny, dialogue.
ReplyDeleteWhat do I wish to do? (i asked) post Public or write private?
and I'm leaning toward a shared solution, toward engagement, toward foisting my work on the Them,
and so I must (then, maybe, if) *work* to get these pieces seen. And so, links to the blog on twitter, g+, requests to readers to spread links.. and tonight, in one of my bars... i push this poem, spread to the limits of my phone screen, across the bar to the bartender. "I need to give this away", I said, so that I will stop picking at it.
And she read, and thought, and commented, and damn, I liked her comments, and now am driven to work further on the piece, not just abandon it or rework it in a new poem.
The doppelganger. The shade. The perfect mirror we see before we die, lurks here, beneath the recognition of others as fragments of our past.. and thanks to a woman I barely know I see this as a truth... a voice beyond my own, singing in my words... if I should write them thus. The leap. That these words are larger. That I can respond to more than my own whims...
Challenges.
until...
ReplyDeletethat smoke that hides the ripper, swirls without.
and running from the face you know, you'll out
yourself,
the mirror-face, the who you were, knife clutched,
guts vulnerable,
beneath the moon, the jack the knife
is all
your choice red
spreading
for the morning watch
to find.