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Can It Be Salvaged? · Poetry Short Short ·
Organised by Anon Y Mous
Word limit 100–2000
Show rules for this event
Clunker
Rusty clunker driving down the road
Sun dropping below the horizon
Cold short days brings promise of winter

Headlights neither low or high yet uneven
Landscape is a haze of shadows
Scared shape emerge with a thunk

One deer rams the driver's door
Deer two jumps on the hood
The deer three wrecks the trunk

Rusty clunker slides down the road
Deer rush to throw themselves in
To ruin the driver's night and to be sunk

Breeze beats the body and the heart stirs
Darkness and nothingness, no one home?
Crawler crawls and looks at junk

Middle of nowhere and the beginning of night
The crawler stands and looks at the end
This thing that used to be a clunker

The stander starts walking alone in night
Dead deer lie all around stinking
Laughing silently at the walkers luck

Walker starts panicking at the sights
Of the rotting does, stags and thinks of the bucks
The type that's given from insurance

For it will not be a reassurance
Not enough to help this manic
Now nothing salvages this sad junker
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#1 ·
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I hope you don't mind:

If I get down into the details on this, author. 'Cause I like it a lot. This stuff's what went through my mind about how you could maybe improve it.

I absolutely love the imagery here and wouldn't mind at all if it was taken even further, the deer wearing flak jackets and combat helmets or all dressed in black like ninjas or something. But the structure's a little weird with rhymes at the end of stanzas 2 through 5 and then again in stanzas 6 and 9, so I don't know what to make of that.

See, for me, poems are all about patterns. When the writer establishes a pattern, I see that as a signal, and when that pattern gets broken, I figure that's some sort of opposite signal. Here, I'm seeing a pattern form, then break, but I'm not getting any idea of what signal I'm being sent. Something's happening, but from context, I can't figure out what that something is. It's the same with the punctuation. There's none except for that one question mark at the end of the the poem's middle line. Its position makes me think that everything should center on that one line and the question it asks, but I'm not seeing anything in the line itself that makes it stand out thematically or dramatically.

And the story the poem tells leaves me scratching my head. The guy's attacked by deer who disable his car and leave him stranded in the snow as night's coming on, and at the end, he's worried about his insurance? Maybe the first part of the poem could focus more on the deer, on them planning this ambush to strike at the human oppressor, and in the end, what's got the guy panicking are thoughts of his payments schedule?

The language, too, works against itself throughout. All the stuff at the beginning makes it seem like the deer are doing this with a purpose: "To ruin the driver's night", we're told. But at the end, the dead deer are "Laughing silently at the walkers luck". There's no luck involved, though: the deer had this planned all along. I also wondered why the deer bodies are already stinking and rotting mere moments after the attack, and I'm not at all sure what "manic" is doing at the end of the send-to-last line.

Like I said, though, I like this a lot. I just think that with some revision, it could really shine.

Mike
#2 ·
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Hmm. I like the tone to this one, but I feel like the way the ending describes him, there's a whole lot of his personality and situation that aren't coming through. As plot, it's fine. He runs into a herd of deer while driving at night, but it seems to be trying to say something about the man, yet I'm not seeing what it is.

It felt like you tried having some gimmicks in the poem as well, but they were intermittent enough that I don't know whether they were intentional. It comes in how you have these kind of constructed personas ending in -er. Through most of the poem, you only have clunker, but then toward the end, you file in crawler, stander, walker, and in somewhat similar places in their stanzas. That progression also seems to follow a toddler's development, and I couldn't tell whether you were doing something thematic with it. Maybe it's just there as an Easter egg for whoever notices, and maybe it is supposed to convey some meaning. If the latter, I couldn't figure out what.