Rapture

[matsunosuperfan]

When, in my mind,
the world drops away,   a very familiar opening gesture
I brush with night, nice verb
watch pieces of the sky  
fall
into the hollow of my chest  very lofty and abstract already, tough ask
where I digest
the coital cosmos   I can't get down with this language; hard not to read it as "cutesy" 
breathing velvet
breaths.    purple prose 

At glitter dusk, this was a cool bit of language play that I do enjoy 
when the world seems to rest    bit of a truism
on the precipice of permanence,  ah, but it's complicated by enjambment! ah, but the enjambment is more lofty, Latinate abstraction with Annoying Alliteration :/ 
I follow the last exhale of a winding day  this is the kind of language that SHOULD be productive, but I just don't like it very much. feels a little common as a metaphor. 
up a dusty road
where hooded pines sway. my favorite image in the poem <3 so tactile and specific, really puts a visual in my mind
The fevered hue  more distasteful (IMO) purpleisms...
darkened, subdued, ...etc
bruised in its final glow. ...etc
The blind moon
climbs the
vault of trees, ok this is also a really cool image
moving
with golden ease.  meh

Standing in a
river
of wind,
my body snaps
into place   around here I begin to realize I am bored 
with a crack
like thunder—
I am alive,
Everything
momentarily
Exact.    feels like something dramatic is happening for the speaker, but they've failed to bring me along for the ride

At mid-day,
when the glass eye of afternoon another really striking image, you have some great metaphors
sweeps across the bay,
the westward windows cloud with cataract stare,  this feels overwritten
full of everything,
seeing nothing there. oh have we been doing rhyme all along? can't say that I enjoy the effect here. distracts more than helps, for me. 

I come to water,  this feels pretentious af, sorry
hand to sun, interesting...
cupping delusions of contentment—  nah, this is way too much direct editorial 
lake of curved alloy,
mercury-smooth,
where husks of
clover heads nod off another striking run of imagery
and dragonfly bellies
glow with liquid light mehhhhhhhh, if not cliche then cliche-adjacent
inside
a time-suspended beam. ending is noticeably weak 

Hi Gibbous and welcome to the [EDIT: FORUM, WELCOME TO THE FORUM, THIS IS NOT REDDIT FML]. I started commenting on this early today on my lunch break and then my shitty office Chromebook crashed :/ this has no relevance other than to explain my failure to be more fulsome with critique. mea culpa < / 3


I feel like this poem needs a good whacking with the Rules of Contemporary Poetry stick. Some really strong moments, mostly when the speaker is letting the arm out a bit with regard to metaphor. But there's an unpleasant and (at least for me) pretty distracting air of "cosplaying Wordsworth," or something like that, which I think the poem needs to get over to realize its promise. It's very hard to place the speaker *anywhere at all* until "the bay" shows up S4. There's a lot of kind of vague metaphysical yapping. I'm not opposed to that in general but you gotta attach it to something eventually, usually. Or else all that yapping better be nothing but bangers. Right now I think we're at like mayyyybe 20% bangers, I.e. nowhere near the level of "holy shit what a line, I will memorize this and think on it often" needed to get away with the aesthetic/poetic mode I think the piece is currently trying to operate in. 

Would love to see what happens if the speaker sheds a bit of the ol' highfalutin' tone - "when in my mind... the coital cosmos breathing velvet... the precipice of permanence... I come to water." Would also love to see what happens if we get a couple "plainspoken" utterances to balance the more flowerly lyrical stuff. This tries to happen with the "river of wind" stanza but it continues to be so abstract/metaphysical that it doesn't do the grounding/scuffing up of the semantic surface that I would hope. 

Curious to see where future drafts of this go, as I think the parts that work are really compelling.