welcome home

It isn't about love, religion, God or global warming. It's just two people dying at the end of the world, in a big city (London, for me.) And it's rather short.

blisters scar the corpses on the streets

blisters from the sunlight.

It's getting hot here.

This is the last day. we know it.

behind the skyscrapers the sun rises

and splinters through the glass.

it burns our shadows into the floor boards

There was soy sauce on your cuff

and urine in your socks.

Author's Note

Evidently, I cannot write names for p*ss.

Reviews

[TLK]

Wow. Unlike Mina, I think the repetition of 'blisters' intensified the searing heat. The way you collapse that into the matter-of-fact "it's getting hot here" jolts me with that tired hatred which overwhelming sunlight brings. Too hot to b***h properly, so you just 'meh'.

The word 'splinter' is a good choice, showing the refraction of that light as it floods destruction all over the post-human world. The 'burns shadows' gives me feelings of a very, very slow Hiroshima -- human agency, human stupidity, human division -- all caught in treacle and killing with time enough to have some last thoughts.

And what do these two people notice? The same things they ever would, disorder and discontent. And they wait, and the end comes, and it smells of piss and salt.

[xx]

If you were worrying, don't worry. Short is good. When you've done pages-long analyses of just about every poem in the latest edition of Sound and Sense (excuse me, /Sound and Sense/), you learn that the true impact a poem leaves depends on many things - and the length of the poem is usually not one of them.

There's a noticeable lack of capitalization, but I don't think that takes away from the quality of the poem. It's a post-apocalyptic scenario, and I imagine that in such a situation, people would have greater things to worry about than crossing their Ts and dotting their Is. I think the lack of capitalization reflects that kind of mindset - the "wasting away and I don't really care too much anymore" mindset.

The indifference of the voice is far more cutting than if the speaker had been passionately regretful or furious at life or wallowing in whatever emotions would be available to two people dying at the end of the world. The indifference is conveyed so succinctly - no unnecessary words and descriptions:

The corpses are blistered. From what? You answer in the second line - the blisters are heat blisters. "It's getting hot here." Captain Obvious is steering the ship, and he doesn't really care one whit where it goes. It doesn't matter, after all. Indifference. It's hot. There are bodies lying in the streets. They're blistering under the sun. Indifference. Last moments - how do they feel about them? "We know it." But do they care?

"There was soy sauce on your cuff and urine in your socks."

Nope. Not one whit.

In addition, those last two lines illustrate just how much dignity there is in death. Die alone, die in a crowd. Die from illness, die from old age, die from something stupid, something heroic, die any time, anywhere. It doesn't matter. We all die with soy sauce on our cuffs and urine in our socks. Death isn't pretty. Death isn't dignified.

I could go on, but this review is stretching itself out and I haven't even commented on the second stanza (or even the title). Lovely poem, and I hope you share more of your work with us. Happy writing! :)

-Mina

[Scytheriax]

It certainly is short.
The repetition of "blisters" in the first two lines kind of throws the poem off. I think if you changed one of them, it would read a little bit easier.
Also, I'm not sure if this is a style of yours, but more capitalization where appropriate would be good, too.
I also feel like some more character development would be a good thing, unless it's supposed to stay that it's anonymous strangers just witnessing some disasters. But if the latter is the case, then maybe expand a bit more on the description of the scene around them.
I liked this poem and definitely the theme behind it, but a little more expansion would make this poem better.