"fearing street crime, japanese wear the hiding place"
not useless the transformation from
dress to
machine. her woman's hair a
mushroom cloud aimed at deflecting
the slant of an eye,
both----
the red skirt folds out to
the shine of cheap plastic
she stands still enough behind
but they walk by.
if they walk by they do
not see the shake of her
hand, the shoes poking
underneath the painted sheet
with windows flat and shining as
eyes,
but blind.
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2 comments:
i think the line breaks can cater more towards the flow of the poem. for example, the first three lines all break at rather non-interesting prepositions: "from" "to" and "a." maybe you can do something like: "not useless the transformation/ from dress/ to machine. her woman's hair/ a mushroom cloud..." i love that, btw, the mushroom cloud metaphor. i like the chemical-ness and fabricated-ness of the fold-out machine combined with only evidence of the woman through parts of her body which show: hair, shoes, hands, and i love the deferral of HER eyes into the non-existent metaphoric eyes of the machine, which catch the eyes of the first stanza. on that note, i think the ending of the first stanza can be much stronger - "deflecting/ the slant of an eye" i feel can be evoke much more the idea of trespass and danger. i actually like "deflecting" maybe just not "slant" - it feels more about the shape of the eye rather than about the act of WATCHING. cool second stanza, though the "enough" there throws me off a bit. "she stands still behind"? play around with the line breaks in the 3rd stanza. i like the repetition of "they walk by" and how the poem ends. cool beans.
hmm, yes: i do need to work on arranging the line breaks, etc. i think the first draft of this thingy was me trying to make some sense of this surreal story. if i read this poem not having seen the article, i wouldn't have a bloody idea what was going on... thanks for the comments- insightful as usual. i'll rethink and repost.
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