zodiac5 Feb 2004

"I thought about my the
rapist."
Is there a word missing here?

"in this flying hunk of steel." - ehhh...

"And still the Rezidence" - I'd drop the 'And'.

"the futility
of you." - there's a better, more original word that 'you'.

"feeling like a stranger in a strange land" - don't say that. Say it originally.

"gotten off my ass" - ehhh...

"unspoken streets" - more like unspeaking (to Americans anyway)

"walked near your job" - are you trying to avoid saying that it was a Starbucks? That's usually the case with that phrasing. Make something up better than job. All good confessional poets do.

"And finally the awkward moment of nudity" - that's an awkward moment of transition.

"buffoon" - ehhh...

"anal" - ditto...

Whew! The crazy thing is that I had almost exactly the same experience in France and Germany once, except that it ended so much worse. You have no idea.

The thing you did with the first part works in some places but mostly not in others. I don't know if you were trying to follow my suggestion, but I would have been happier I think leaving the lines whole and just breaking them into stanzas, like:

I think of you as I would any self-made image:
(break)
I was sitting there in the international terminal,
waiting for my flight to Munich, anticipating our rendezvous,
and watching Annie Hall.
(break)
I seem to have established a fondness for Woody Allen,
but I'm thinking I'm too young to appreciate him.
(and so on. keep the stanza breaks you have and number or mark them somehow.)

The end is really dense-looking still. Is it that you just haven't redone the last half yet? It looks scary. Poetry readers like to see more white on a page than black, I've learned. Anyway, I'm witholding my vote for another revise.