Spec(ta)tors, on the Edge of a Phantom Blade
Distractions are keeping my thoughts from fully forming,
soon-to-be shades of a life I’m leaving behind.
These ghosts are not the haunting type,
benevolent memories of times we rolled up our sleeves together.
The power to bring these beings back to life
is (for now) in my hands,
but with every passing moment that pulse grows weaker.
This is not playing with life and death,
this is whether or not to bring these lives into my own
or to continue on my own path, content with mental snapshots
of visages that will not age, but risk fading from clarity
after several days or weeks or months, or perhaps just a few.
These distractions are not a nuisance.
In fact, poetry has no place without them,
as it is these drifting consciences that read what is written,
that serve as inspiration for the content of my mind.
Though time may dilute what these spirits once meant,
the proof is in this poem.
May 17, 2011 at 4:09 pm
Seems to be writing for catharsis. Reads almost as Fever Ray’s song “I’m Not Done.” Personal without metaphor, reads almost literally as a push not just to be looking back at writing, but to keep doing so. The proof is in the last line, though it seems as if it could be more desperate. As you write, “These distractions are not a nuisance,” and of course they’re not: experience brings reflection to the surface. So perhaps they’re not a nuisance so much as wasted, or if not wasted diluted. That’s actually the most prevalent theme in the poem, being diluted. Given that you deal almost completely in abstraction here, you could bring in some concrete images of what might be lost, but only glimpses, just to grant the reader insight too on what is lost. Otherwise it will remain a piece much more for you than for others.