Free verse № 93332
No Sunday Clothes
A question, God, if you have time.
And if you don't, well that's just fine.
I'd like to know, if you don't mind,
just how can you be so very unkind?
I see these people from day to day,
who have nothing and give it away.
They turn the pages every night,
and never see your shining light.
Some have terrible, terrible scars,
from loss and death and pain and wars.
And some have voices in their head.
Some, it seems, are better off dead.
Still they paint your bearded visage,
and that of your son, made in your image.
So what do they get for their bottomless faith,
but hunger and poverty...murder and rape?
I do not ask for myself, you see
for I have all that I'll ever need.
Which confuses me that much more, I suppose.
Because I need no Sunday clothes.
18 comments
That said, I should point out that don't pretend to be able to write a great poem myself, I do know how to judge them. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure I'm one of the very few people on this site who actually does talk and write about poetry for a living - and a pretty decent one - rather than as some kind of hobby, on his/her lunch-break from writing code or sculpting small wooden animals. And I'm heir to a dried-meat fortune which, as I have explained elsewhere (http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.
Or like saying, "Have you heard the one about the nun who says 'Well I'm really the bus driver!'" Somehow, despite that the bulk of this poem has almost nothing to do with the punch-line, I still saw it coming like a freight train, which is not good for poetry. Not to mention that ignoring an irrational traditional conception of Jehovah on His holy day is already handled much better in poems like this one here(http://www.bartleby.com/265/355.htm
Do you want more?
If you changed this poem so that the first line was:
"I questioned God blah blah blah blah blah," and so on, it would be a 100% improvement. Oh, and make it really rhyme if you're going to use rhyme! Oh, and find some original words to rhyme! That's a difficult thing to ask, because it means reading a bunch of poems and seeing what words they rhyme. You could start by reading all the so-called rhyming poems on this site and avoiding anything they do like the proverbial plague.
More?
Second, um, like, YEAH whatever God there is must allow terrible things to happen to good people, even on Sundays. There's not going to be a single person reading your poem for whom this isn't a pretty mundane already-thought line-of-thought. You might pride yourself then on the universality of your oh-so-cleverly-expressed sentiments, but you probably shouldn't.
Third, do you notice how practically every line in your poem ends with a comma or period (and the one that doesn't, should)? Well, don't do that anymore. In my experience, that comes from not being able to write poetry more than one line at a time (same with the AABB,) which is a complete crock of shit. Amateur hack internet poets write
'Let's go down to the Gentleman's Club.'
And that's it. They don't really have a plan to finish out the rhyme, so they start thinking of words: scrub, cub, nub, shrub, stub... Stub works, maybe. They get another line
'You pay and the ticket-man gives you a stub.'
This is like pulling teeth to read. Each line is its own clause, which means no clause can be longer than, say, ten syllables unless you're CLS or a fucking idiot. The rhythm's shot, there's practically no connection between lines, couplets, verses or anything. You've got to have a plan, and something that holds it together, like:
Let's go down to the Gentleman's Club
Where the toiletbowl always flushes,
And the girls all smell like a drain and scrub
Their cunnies with toilet brushes.
See? Unity. Interesting rhymes. A sense of each line building on the previous. Sex. Okay, despite the fact that it's about toilet brushes, can you see how that's a more structurally interesting quatrain than anything in your poem? Yes? No? More?
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