Crucified Excrement

The busted brass trumpets blare, held by tone deaf lepers

Apocryphal Godheads shiver to see me thrive in the grey

Left to gawk at the cretins who secreat lamb piss

Those left adrift suffocate in the squalor of drugs and sex

How many spurious c***s had the misguided lord molested

Ripped from the womb and molded by gaunt fingers

I have six days to billow beyond this brittle shell

And by the seventh the remarkable shall celebrate in sodomy

Jesus is the buffoon hiding beneath his mother’s skirt

I watched as he sanctified all those bullet wounds

The slack jawed mummies deny, deny and deny

As we quench our pollution with sweet red tincture

Sexy seraphs left damp with wide spread thighs

Shackled and bound to a dogwood bedpost

Rabid hounds howl with their insanity

As they are slaughtered just to appease liberated angels

Dare I ask who exhumed the moldy tales

I say its best we let carcasses rot

Join in throwing dirt upon the casket

Better yet, let us cremate the entire lot

Christ wept when he saw the army of New Gomorrah

Captains of leather invade Easter with their anal sex

The hyenas lap up the Jesuit blood

We will march forward to Golgotha to pulverize dusty bones

A Poignant shepard masturbates with crucifix wounds

Allow me to spread the salt and twist that old Roman spear

Only the beguiled lemmings listen to that twat

And the rest of us piss upon crucified excrement

Reviews

[JayG]

• The busted brass trumpets blare, held by tone deaf lepers

Seriously? So, some idiot searched out lepers who are tone deaf, AND trumpet players then assembled them to play broken instruments? And they didn't tell this fool to go to hell?

You’re WAY beyond reaching here, and into head-shaking territory.

• Apocryphal Godheads shiver to see me thrive in the grey

So… Apocryphal means untrue, and And Godhead means the Christian God. And, you don’t define what “the grey” is, so the line is literally meaningless to anyone but you, who possess both intent and context.

You say your stories are dark, but this isn't darkness. It's meaningless to anyone but you.

My point? Unless the reader has context for the meaning you intend—as-they-read—the words are meaningless, and they’ll stop reading right where you confused them.

So…dark or light, serious or funny, the only one who takes meaning from your work, as it’s read, is you. But poetry is meant to read aloud, and reacted to as-it’s-read. And after the work of writing and editing, “Huh?” isn’t the best reaction.

Some things to think about:

First, while you write from your chair, of course, always edit from that of the reader, who knows nothing of your intent, and who has no context but what you supply or evoke.

Next: While you have both context and intent guiding your understanding, the reader doesn’t, and that needs to be taken into account if error free communication is to take place.

Finally: Instead of talking TO the reader, invite them in. Don’t hand them facts, move them emotionally. Raise curiosity. Give them reason to WANT to read more. We don’t tell the reader that we cried at a funeral, we make them cry.

Harder to do? Absolutely. But like fiction, poetry is emotion-based, and we learned none of the tricks of that approach to writing in school because specializations, like fiction, poetry, and medicine, etc., are learned in addition to the book-report writing skills we’re given there.

One great resource is the Shmoop site. They analyze lots of poems, in depth, to show why they work—things you can use.

Yes, you use your poems to express your feelings, but with the tricks the pros use, you can make the reader “get” you, and react. And given that your work hasn’t been getting the number of responses you might want, a bit of help in that direction might make a huge difference.

After all, as Sir Kingsley Amis said: “If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing.”


Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/