Eiji Tunsinagi

My monotone love is a sick little
penguin on ice at edge of sea.

I am listless. I hate the page.
I don't have a pen. And A4 is foreign...
Instead, here. Here is my pile.
Collected against white, a still life.

De-canned foodstuffs, Russian imports
of German chocolates -

My tuxedo ruffled, I lie on my back
waiting to show you my
relatively digested love.


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Should have put this in the challenge!!

__________________
"nothing is perfect, nothing lasts, and nothing is finished."

"how will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?"

steinbeckwannabe

How does the title connect to the poem? I think I get the main image...the penguin vomit thing compared to what you (not the reader, but you personally) can offer someone you love, but the title threw me off.

Baron

Penguins are black and white?

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Voodoo

Isn't vomit the technicolor spew?

Travmire

When I read this poem, I thought of prom. If that is what it's about, then I don't see how the second stanza fits in with the poem. Even if it isn't about prom, I still don't see the connection of that stanza to the rest of the poem.

Matthatter

The bold- I both like and dislike this. I think I felt what you were meaning to convey... throwing up is disgusting, and sympathizing with that makes one sick. Repeating it in line two works well for this, and then to tap off the double-dose of ill feelings, we're told that this is a constant. Pretty powerful.

But, my problem when reading it was that the feeling was soon overshadowed by the statements repetition in line two, minus the "I" at the beginning. It was sort of too strong a shock, as my brain was still fresh with the the first "I-throw-up", as the description for what you're doing, so when I read it the second time without an "I" I just processed it in a way that become consciously known as conflict/confusion.

I would suggest

Waiting for her,
I throw up
constantly.
Little, sick-
a penguin on ice
at the edge of sea.

As for the unbolded part- I like it. I wrote it this way both to work well with the beginning and, when you break the line off at "sick" on "A little sick", I think I understand that you're trying to explain you're sickm to hold that idea, and then go into the penguin metpahor, but I think "a little sick" conflicts with throwing up constantly. So I changed it to little... like you are feeling small, weak, and then sick, and then the penguin.

I am listless. I hate them.

I can't figure out what/who you mean by "them"... all I can come up with is "lists".

I don't have a pen.

Okay, here I assume you mean lists then. That is clever... but I reacted so strong to the use of listless as energiless, a sickened melancoly, that I assume "them" refers to a group of people, somehow connected to the one you wait for. This might just be a problem for me though, I'm not sure whether many others would react to it that way.

Hmm, I get the image of somehow who likes the idea of indulging himself in things that may actually be threatening, painful. Looking for idols to consume; a salvation that has yet to cause the alleviation of sickness (and, perhaps, even causing it), for one what truly worships are the bumps on life's highway, for they wake you up and fill you with life.

Eiji Tunsinagi

Thanks guys. You all sort of get the idea. Sort of. Any other opinions...?

__________________
"nothing is perfect, nothing lasts, and nothing is finished."

"how will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?"

Severn

You're not alone - I think the same. If listless is supposed to be a play on words, I'm not sure it's working because of the word's true meaning, and the fact that that true meaning is likely a symptom of endless vomiting heh.

Question for you Eiji - is it important that we as readers 'get' what you're trying to say? I've found that a poem can produce all kinds of interpretations for different people, simply because of the often ambiguous form a poem takes.

I'm thinking that if you shift abruptly from an image of vomiting while waiting for someone, to a possible play on words, and then introduce a mysterious 'them' it's almost unavoidable that we the readers will only ever 'sort of' get it.

And having said that I think your poem wouldn't suffer a bit from being made shorter, and conciser, by losing that entire verse. Because, to me, that verse adds nothing. But I really like the first one, and the last two (except for the word 'relatively' which seems like an attempt to over-explain the biological process of vomit).

Cheers

K

Jaguar

I like this one. I also didn't like the first two lines with the constant puking. The part about the chocolates, perfect. I like this one.

Keep it up!

Thanks,
Jag

Amadeus

Bigger targets are easier to hit!

Eiji Tunsinagi

Interesting...and I even don't really like the 1st stanza but the penguin part. I might cut it shorter. I was just trying out a different style with this one. Happy it wasn't a complete failure. I understand a lot of it is interpretable to the individual, and I kind of like that. You can take this poem as something surreal (if you take it as concrete/literal) or you can see it may have some deeper meaning if you want to look deeper.

And with the them Matthatter got it. The them is simply in reference to lists. Maybe I should change the wording though so readers don't think I'm talking about a group of people or something...or maybe I like that it can garner multiple interpretations.

Thanks guys.

Any other likes/dislikes?

__________________
"nothing is perfect, nothing lasts, and nothing is finished."

"how will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?"

Ilasir Maroa

Do penguins feed with regurgitated food?

__________________
My hopeful book:
Crap! Haven't posted it anywhere yet, darn!
"Only tyranny cloaks itself in shadows. The light of justice can not be hidden."

www.theoddvillepress.com

Eiji Tunsinagi

To the penguin children. The parents do it for the kids. It's relatively disturbing.

__________________
"nothing is perfect, nothing lasts, and nothing is finished."

"how will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?"

Ilasir Maroa

I wasn't quite sure... So does that apply to poem in any way?

__________________
My hopeful book:
Crap! Haven't posted it anywhere yet, darn!
"Only tyranny cloaks itself in shadows. The light of justice can not be hidden."

www.theoddvillepress.com

Eiji Tunsinagi

It does. I've saved all my food waiting to feed it to my lover when she returns. My food consists mostly of chocolates. I wanted to bring this point out more when I wrote the poem, but I never got around to it - so now it's all "interpret-ty".

__________________
"nothing is perfect, nothing lasts, and nothing is finished."

"how will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?"