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Interminable
You spend each day pushing and pulling and weeping
The seeds you thought sown, but there's no grain for reaping
Just choking on dust, inspiration's a bitch
You hope that your rivals have hit the same hitch
Oh. They've published something great;
Now all your thoughts are out of date.
They're playing and bonding by means so expensive
Your budget is broken, your pain is intensive
Still, slowly you're saving and gathering gold
The price comes in sight for to join the great fold
Ah. Supply chain's crashed again;
There won't be more 'til who knows when.
If only your body and brain could act normal
As prayers perdure, the polite turns ‘informal’
Each daily dose taken that used to do good
Will medicine make your parts do what they should?
Nope. It stabs with every breath;
You can't get up, just dream of death.
Your peers are advancing, look: one more promotion
And zeroth percentile is not a nice notion
So get it together, and clear out some space
For motive and will to get out of last place
Oops. They took the final spot;
The music's stopped. You're left to rot.
Hmm. Perhaps you're thinking wrong?
Perspective can make weak from strong.
If putting your mind to the task with more hope
Would open up chances to
Nope. It stabs with every breath.
The seeds you thought sown, but there's no grain for reaping
Just choking on dust, inspiration's a bitch
You hope that your rivals have hit the same hitch
Oh. They've published something great;
Now all your thoughts are out of date.
They're playing and bonding by means so expensive
Your budget is broken, your pain is intensive
Still, slowly you're saving and gathering gold
The price comes in sight for to join the great fold
Ah. Supply chain's crashed again;
There won't be more 'til who knows when.
If only your body and brain could act normal
As prayers perdure, the polite turns ‘informal’
Each daily dose taken that used to do good
Will medicine make your parts do what they should?
Nope. It stabs with every breath;
You can't get up, just dream of death.
Your peers are advancing, look: one more promotion
And zeroth percentile is not a nice notion
So get it together, and clear out some space
For motive and will to get out of last place
Oops. They took the final spot;
The music's stopped. You're left to rot.
Hmm. Perhaps you're thinking wrong?
Perspective can make weak from strong.
If putting your mind to the task with more hope
Would open up chances to
Nope. It stabs with every breath.
Quite good. An odd cadence to it. The first two lines of each large stanza have an extra unstressed syllable on the end, but it keeps that pattern up, so good enough. At least until the final one, and I don't know whether the break is deliberate or meaningful. Rhyme scheme is flawless. The message here is good, too, and it even seems to me there are multiple messages: one about overcoming writer's block, and one about realizing more and more that life is passing you by, where there's always a new crowd of younger, more skilled people waiting to take your place.
You're going to fail once or twice, or three hundred,
And feel all your feelings are broken or plundered;
Let go of the struggle and focus on you,
Forget all the crowd, you've your own work to do.
No need to cut against the grain,
Take on, take off, and try again!
And feel all your feelings are broken or plundered;
Let go of the struggle and focus on you,
Forget all the crowd, you've your own work to do.
No need to cut against the grain,
Take on, take off, and try again!
Interminable, some kind of retrospective:
Thank you for the silver, voters. As with most of my poetry entries (well, and most of my writing in general), this was composed rather impulsively.
For what it's worth, the metrical shifts, including the loss of the last syllable in the second couplets of the major stanzas, are meant to reflect the jerky start-stop pattern of trying to proceed with unsteady energy to advance while underlying issues claw back at you, and repeatedly missing the target and falling back. The last group starts out in the “weakness” state after the demoralizing sequence of failures, tries to reassure itself into the “moving” one, then gets dragged back down even harder and faster than before.
The first group can certainly be interpreted as writer's block but can also be applied to a lot of other kinds of intellectual work; those with experience in academia may recognize the dynamic at play.
Thanks to >>Pascoite and >>GroaningGreyAgony for the commentary and feedback. I remain curious whether any specific changes come to mind that would have made some of the above come through more clearly.
See y'all around!
Thank you for the silver, voters. As with most of my poetry entries (well, and most of my writing in general), this was composed rather impulsively.
For what it's worth, the metrical shifts, including the loss of the last syllable in the second couplets of the major stanzas, are meant to reflect the jerky start-stop pattern of trying to proceed with unsteady energy to advance while underlying issues claw back at you, and repeatedly missing the target and falling back. The last group starts out in the “weakness” state after the demoralizing sequence of failures, tries to reassure itself into the “moving” one, then gets dragged back down even harder and faster than before.
The first group can certainly be interpreted as writer's block but can also be applied to a lot of other kinds of intellectual work; those with experience in academia may recognize the dynamic at play.
Thanks to >>Pascoite and >>GroaningGreyAgony for the commentary and feedback. I remain curious whether any specific changes come to mind that would have made some of the above come through more clearly.
See y'all around!
>>Light_Striker
The problem with poetry is that it relies a lot on subtlety, and outright saying something can screw up the aesthetic in a way it doesn't with prose. So all I can think of are inelegant solutions where you explicitly mention academic topics, or you get a little meta and have the poem comment on its own rhythmic choices, or at least make pretty obvious references or parallels to them. That's almost certainly not the best answer, though. It may also be a case of author credibility. If I'm reading someone I've never encountered before, I'm more likely to assume a mistake is a mistake. If I'm reading someone who has a long-standing good reputation, I'm more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt, assume mistakes are deliberate, and actively look for effects they might have been trying to accomplish. Given the general quality of the poem, I probably should have been doing the latter but got lazy.
The problem with poetry is that it relies a lot on subtlety, and outright saying something can screw up the aesthetic in a way it doesn't with prose. So all I can think of are inelegant solutions where you explicitly mention academic topics, or you get a little meta and have the poem comment on its own rhythmic choices, or at least make pretty obvious references or parallels to them. That's almost certainly not the best answer, though. It may also be a case of author credibility. If I'm reading someone I've never encountered before, I'm more likely to assume a mistake is a mistake. If I'm reading someone who has a long-standing good reputation, I'm more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt, assume mistakes are deliberate, and actively look for effects they might have been trying to accomplish. Given the general quality of the poem, I probably should have been doing the latter but got lazy.
>>Pascoite A perfectly cromulent answer. And yeah, it's definitely a tricky space—I'm trying to get better at judging the author/audience gap there, since that seems to be a place I'm weak, and this helps. Thanks!