unacceptable

i've been told
it's unacceptable
to dwell
on echoed words
stained with blood
from flesh torn to pieces
by words ripped from poems
read aloud into a mouth
dark with want

no longer am i to
linger in burning vineyards
singed as the wings of icarus
or extinguish flesh flames
in water
used to cool your
fevered forehead
the night we roamed
a fairy tale
never written

i've been told
these things
are unacceptable

instead
i turn to craft

gloria
curls of fire
bold black eyes
sun singed skin
beautiful
60 stories tall
with answers
i write her into my arms
to my bed
face frozen with longing
legs lusting for stability
hands rake flesh
strawberry lips quiver
two bodies one
cupped as hands
then
silence
the loneliness
of stranger sex
and awkward rest
sleep

i wake
and erase the whole sorted affair
somehow now
unacceptable to me


Michael Lorne Leard


Notes:

It occurs to me that some might find this poem a bit difficult to wrap themselves around. It is actually, and here's why.

Without getting into what the content actually means, I'll tell you about how the poem works.

The first two parts are intentionally run on sentences, normally my lines are, for the most part enjambed, but in this case, I'm being told I can no longer linger in lost love; mourn these moments that only mean something to me. It's unhealthy, we'll so I'm told. So I make an effort to have you read each of the first two parts in their entirety to get their syntax.

So in an effort to refocus my mind, I create gloria.
Something to write about other than my musings on lost love.
Each of these lines, for the most part are enjambed.
They satnd alone.
They are quick and involve very little work to understand. So they mean less. To the reader and to me, the writer, at least in comparison with the level of involvement required of the first two.

I'm very involved and invested in the first two stanzas, I spend time crafting long and involved lines that stretch the syntax across their respective stanzas. You have to be involved with them, spend time with them, work at them before you get the idea. Like I did with the subject that inspired the poem.

In an effort to not mope and linger, I create something fictional to write about,
which means nothing, therefore requires little involvement, it reads fast, it's a hollow.
As it is likely to be, as it has no emotional meaning for me.

The last part is me realizing this, and waking to the fact, that for better or worse, I have to write what means somehthing to me, or it will mean nothing to no one.

So erase the the gloria part.

Really it's like two poems, better yet, a scene in a play. The reader is in the room with me, I'm talking out loud to myself, responding by writing a poem, then realizing it's shallow and deleting it.

This poem, for me, is less about artistically crafted words, than it is the mechanics of how the poem actually reads, how it works, to convey the idea. For the most part, it's use of syntax, run on, and enjambment ARE the idea.
A sort of medium is the message deelio.

M