Music

[billy]

I wish I could play the guitar.
Then I could sing you what I've been trying to say
all these years in sloppy free verse,
as the strumming of the strings

reinforces each line and covers my lapses
in eloquence, the times when my neurosis
demands a thousand adjectives, so a table
cannot just be a table, but must be a

threatening or seductive table.
From the bark of my thoughts I would carve for you
lullabies about my mother,
not only stripping her for you and my creative ego

but weaving her into tapestries of sound,
where she would rest, a bright figure,
with a gollywog smile and Russian doll intricacy
beside her successor, my dad's second wife, what an exemplary verse

the drowned woman staring always at the sun.
And how we would laugh over steaming coffees
as some political fellow recites a poem about the war,
my guitar leaning against my chair and facing

him while he prattles on. The strap would be frayed
where it meets my neck and I would play for pennies
on street corners, not because I need
the money but just for the experience.

Music has always seemed so pure,
and me a jezabel in a monkhouse
completely ignorant of it, obviously this isn't true
expressing my sin through random and silent line breaks.

the whole poem is 4 sentences longgggggggggggggggggggggg which averages out at about 50 words a sentence (give or take)

that said i enjoyed it very much, some nice little nuances going on, like the guitar facing the politician. the wanting to busk for the experience.
the 4th was a great verse, my favourite. the comparison of mum and step mum was so good.

my main nit is the sentence run ons, for me you need to at least double, if not triple the amount to at least two sentence a verse on average.
for me the poem ends at monkhouse. again for me that would be a superbly fantastic end. the line; completely ignorant of it, feels like a contradiction if you don't want to remove the last two lines just remove that one...please

the 2nd person in the poem feels vague, i think mentioned just twice but it works, for me the poem is more about how we feel a little repressed, what we wish could do or achieve, and the need to break out boundaries.
it's also about regret that we aren't sure how to express. while the poem feels upbeat; it has undertones of sadness which temper the lightness of it and thereby making it more solid, giving it more depth.

for me it's only a small edit away from being very publishable. jmo

thanks for the read