Blogs are terrible places to write poetry. The formatting is so SHITTY. Anyhow, I am determined to share these poems and get folks' feedback. I'm really trying to workshop them so please sit with them for awhile before getting back to me....or tell me what your first responses are and then sit with them again to get another taste. The subject matter is kinda heavy which makes analysis hard sometimes. But I trust you fabulous folks can find a way to engage the poems as both my own expressions and as tools needing refinement. Here's the link to the document with the poems.
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(on The Philosopher's Stone)
I like how the first line "I wanted" stands alone like this. It is almost like a confession. In a way it works well with the title because, we often see religion and philosophy as at odds with each other. The occurrence of a confession under the title of philosophy illustrates that you are not exactly addressing a person or even a corporeal audience--as we see later, in the last stanza of the poem where you say aloud "if you can hear me / if you are there" the lowercase even gives the suggestion of being on ones knees. What follows here, "my only request is..." flips the notion of confession about to one of petition, still addressing a not-necessarily-corporeal-listener, omnipresent (or not), but you have your own agenda.
When you reveal to the reader what you had wanted ("to turn this body of dross into something of value") it seems at first that this is a desire from the past being recalled (and in that voice, not having been fulfilled). In the final stanza, your desires are given life again in the present tense. You don't say "my only request is that you _will_ unhinge me" but instead, "that you unhinge me" -- the impact of the desire on the ear is immediate. The word "unhinge" has a man-made and mechanic quality to it that is contrasted by the flowers you call to emerge from your own being--something organic, what was once inorganic and arid ("ashes" to other men) becomes a garden growing still more beautiful and impossible things (beyond human, earth itself).
it seems, if my reading is correct, that the virus is the philosopher's stone? the religious/philosophical/organic that people attribute revelations and transformations to are all wrapped up and represented in the poem by the virus. The virus here is not objective, nor an objective reality, but instead a subjective and judicious force that may or may not hear the outcry of the author. this is the risk that the poem itself takes. The virus, instead of being a subjectless fate passed back and forth it is a possibility, an internal eternity that challenges the smokey cough induced by the mix of breath and ash. Instead of fear, a request; an organic miracle that makes sense of its various components. Out of ash, something "human." Out of dross, some "deficiency" that yet can be of some value--though the land of this body was not fertile for men, may it at least grow flowers.
*spelling question: should "posses" be "possess"?
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