What If (Revised)

[skylightgreg]

What if all the poems of the world
were trees, chopped down for kindling
one by one until there were no poems left,
entire ecosystems of free thought destroyed
in a matter of moments; would you suck in
the smoke and get high on poetic metaphor,
one last time--to feel it stretch your imagination
beyond the midnight iron curtain of a black and white
mind, the rigidity of masculine grind, divorced from poetic
discovery, the She of shimmering find?

Would you bravely protect your poetic self
like a poem-oak, and come
crashing down, all lyrical bones shattered like glass.

What of the remaining splintered air?

Would the toxic fumes
of a dichotomous mind
--the conventional world
either. or.
become 
your new elixir?

[Dave]

A small  nit is the lack of question mark at the end of the first stanza, though I would suggest a question mark after moments followed by a new sentence as the punctuation does not quite work for me there. While the premise of the poem is interesting, for my taste and it is my taste, there are too many questions to consider. They tend to rob each other of focus and demand a lot of the reader. I suspect they are also rhetorical and so will not ahve definitive answers.

I am personally also not even sure  if I understand what they mean - especially that last one.

[skylightgreg]

LOL.  

I agree with what you are saying.  Somehow my mind likes to create these sorts of analogies that feel really resonant until they start to feel muddled.  I mean:  are we talking about poetry here, or trees?  I know how the two are inextricably linked, by way of the final stanza, but I haven't conveyed any of that in a way that is translatable.

So.  I don't know.  I may scrap the whole thing, or try to re-work it.

[indar]

I'd love to see see it reworked sans questioning and stated as an actual happening. It would be a shame to lose such fine imagery as:

Would you bravely protect your poetic self
like a poem-oak, and come
crashing down, all lyrical bones shattered like glass.

I certainly can see this as a personal declaration rather than question.

[Tracy Mitchell]

Hi Greg--

Scrap it?  NOOOOOOOOOO!!

This is a challenging and captivating poem.  I struggle in places, and am awed in other places. The first three-four lines are magnificent.  But L. 5 – if trees were chopped one by one for kindling, that wouldn’t occur in a “matter of moments”.  But then lines 6 &7 retake the momentum.  L.9– is “mind” what you want?  I play with alternatives–night, world, nation, etc.  I also thought”. . . the midnight iron of a black and white curtain”.  I don’t know if any of this spurs something, but it appears to be a point at which the poem might move.

S.2 – not sure I follow the text- if the poem-oak crashes down, in what way have it bravely protected itself?  It makes sense to me if it were to say “bravely try to protect. . .yet still come crashing down. . . .”  Not sure what you mean with this.

S.3 L.1– What a surprising and marvelous one line stanza.  I keep going back to it, and each new read of the poem leaves me pausing here.  And honestly, it’s strength overshadows the last stanza, six lines.  Would you consider ending the poem here?  If it were mine, I would be sorely tempted to end this on such a strong line.  And to me it feels like a full and complete whole at this point.

Just my thoughts.  If there is anything which helps--good, otherwise please ignore.

Thanks for posting.

T