Here's a little poem which is also a piece of fiction, because none of it ever happened. Look at me, combining two genres at once. Seriously, sorry for the delay in posting, but I'm back in school for my final year and it's all exam-ish. Enjoy.
Love and War
I am not complete enough. I do not
live what I believe. Show me equality and I will
nod and smile despite knowing that
I might never love you more than I did the night
when you tore your lip fighting with your brother
and then sat in the car with your knuckles bleeding
and the radio on. I do not know what makes a man a man.
I guess I used to believe that it wasn’t important.
Now I struggle to reconcile the politics of our bodies:
you have your fists, and I have notebooks
pens and ink. The instruments of love and war.
I am not complete enough. I do not
live what I believe. Show me equality and I will
nod and smile despite knowing that
I might never love you more than I did the night
when you tore your lip fighting with your brother
and then sat in the car with your knuckles bleeding
and the radio on. I do not know what makes a man a man.
I guess I used to believe that it wasn’t important.
Now I struggle to reconcile the politics of our bodies:
you have your fists, and I have notebooks
pens and ink. The instruments of love and war.
11 comments:
I particularly like that line 'I do not know what makes a man a man.'
x
Where do you get all that, 'brother fighting, torn lip, knuckles bleeding, radio playing' stuff if it's not founded in some real event?
The power of your imagination is consistently awesome - in the original, not the American usage of the word.
You *will* name-check me when you are a literary megastar, won't you?
Rachel: Thank you very much, I'm glad you liked it.
Ken: I am highly flattered. If you promise to name-check me, I will gladly return the favour ;)
I am sad that this poem never happened. I guess all the stuff I wish I was doing, I end up writing poems and stories about it instead, which is probably a poor consolation really. Awesome, though: there's a compliment, thank you for that.
A fine piece. I like the quiet voice that considers so overwhelming a question.
Good luck with the last year. If you're doing Theatre Studies I'll send you some tips!
Your words create great images!
well done!
Don't be too sad about the things you aren't doing! I wish I'd done more thinking and reading when I was 17 but it's too late to change that now! Your brain is at its most porous...enjoy the cells while you have them and use them like crazy. Plenty of time for abusing them later.
x
Oh and plenty of time for wasting your loveliness on men/boys/people who almost certainly don't deserve you later too.
x
It seems that I'm losing not just days, but whole weeks. I'll try to be more timely in my comments...
There's a lot going on in this small passage, which does make the short fiction very much poetry because of the economical density of thought/feeling. That and the beauty of the words :).
Wow, this is great.
Wow, wow, wow!
Look, I express my words good, oi!
ps: This is Saoirse from dramaaa.
(:
I like, "The instruments of love and war." Question is: which is for which?
Precocious? (in the "early-ripening" sense -check my sp) Prodigy? Paragon?
Fiendish, you are all of these and more. (I mean this in the best sense.)
Kat
There is obviously a lot of feeling behind this poem - and it shines through. It improves with every reading.
Post a Comment