Around Again

[RiverNotch]

Ok, here's my first shot in this forum. Enjoy - or not !

Around Again


Some say we’re back at the beginning,
but maybe it’s just the intermission,
and we’ve forgotten where we’ve left the popcorn.
The movie plays on,
but we’re still in the lobby
eternally wondering if the guy will get the girl
or vice verse. Do you leave the theater when it's intermission, especially for them unreasonably short intermezzos of movies? There's a certain lack of sense in the passage of time here -- and the opening line seems to speak of something else entirely, something that I feel is integral to the piece, but needs clarification.


We play a slick reversal, and soon
it is we who know how to call the shots The image here, to me, is obvious enough -- reversal of who's on what side of the screen. The thought, though, is a bit lost to me -- I can feel you're speaking of something beyond the movies, but what exactly? 
and do the chasing,
around the block corner
over the railroad tracks These last three lines sound overshort. 
where we find the old boxcar of our dreams
with the hairy mustached man sitting there,
waiting for us to jump aboard the moving steel
and leave the rocks under our shoes behind. "Leave the rocks under our shoes behind" sounds like an over-poeticized construction. Otherwise, these last four lines are beautiful.


We enter a new world we may return from eventually - Cadence this time runs overlong.
now returning seems silly. If the speaker considered returning silly, why even, in the poem, consider it a possibility? The construction of the speaker's journey into the film seems metaphorical enough, so I think the thought of this and the last line could easily be condensed.
Trees fly by on the way to somewhere
and blue sky doesn’t look so real
when eyes dilate and lose focus
on the specifics of life. What you want to convey here is palpable enough (that is, the scene, and perhaps the thought, though the thought itself I cannot yet put to words, since you haven't given me the tools yet), but I do think that the imagery here is a bit too abstract, compared to (in my mind) its counterpart, the vision of the boxcar. A bit more poeticizing, perhaps? Or perhaps not -- the more I think about this, the more this feels right. Your decision.

I don't think it's cryptic, just sometimes confused, or incomplete. But there is the sense that you're saying something here that hasn't been said before, which is good.