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A Night in the City

by hailfabio 

Posted: 23 April 2007
Word Count: 157
Summary: Ambitious this...


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It's slyly cold
with the sun over,
seeing the other side of the world.
Whoever thought the world
was flat, must've wondered why the sun
disappeared everday. Perhaps a great-big
eye, that slept when we did, very coincidentally.

To imagine,
is the mind's freedom. Unfortunately,
we know why, for most things - it's all
scientific - the sky doesn't exist, gas and
water floating around. Yet we see animals up there
and men, even man-made machines. How
did they get up there?
We put them up there
of course we did, anything can be put up there and
if you dare,
you can lose yourself
in a stare.

Has that drunken
misguided man stopped talking
about me yet? His scrumpled up
face pains with confusion and fear. As he
stumbles away behind enduring city
backdrops carrying more wind than
is comfortable, I wonder if he managed to
stumble away from his thoughts.

Even for a little while.






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Comments by other Members



James Graham at 21:44 on 25 April 2007  Report this post
My first thought was that you could have just the last section on the drunk man as a poem in itself, with the same title 'A Night in the City' This last section works very well for me - very free free-verse, the rhythm and line arrangement perfect for the unco-ordinated, stumbling impression we get of the drunk man.

But though the last section could perhaps be isolated, I'm not sure it should or needs to be. It's juxtaposed with everything in the previous sections - for reasons that I'm not sure about. Yet. I'll give the poem more thought and comment again.

James.

James Graham at 13:51 on 27 April 2007  Report this post
It's hard to see a connection between the drunk man and the rest of the poem. Drunk men do tend to intrude on our personal space, and tend also to talk to you, or about you, sometimes because they think they know you - but that connection doesn't seem enough. You juxtapose the drunk man with some 'night thoughts' which the poem's speaker has about science and imagination. The main thought is that before we had scientific explanations for natural phenomena , we used our imagination to explain them. (And invented a wonderful variety of sun gods to explain what happens when the sun sets. In Japanese mythology the sun goddess has a spat with her brother every day and hides in a cave till morning; various peoples imagined the sun crossing the sky in an invisible boat, or a chariot.)

But...the connection between this and the drunk man? Is it that, when he is sober, this man might have thoughts like the ones in the first two sections? Being drunk, he can 'stumble away from his thoughts'. The poem's speaker is saying, 'He's lucky to have escaped from his thoughts, but I can't'. However, your thoughts about science and imagination don't seem the kind of thoughts you'd want to escape from; they seem reasonable and interesting. If the first two sections were full of depressing thoughts, the speaker would perhaps envy the drunk man being anaesthetised against them.

That's as far as I can go with this one! I could easily be missing something, though.

James.


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