Am I insane? I must be insane!
If you were insane you wouldn't know you were insane so you must be sane you wouldn't be here if you were insane.
I must be insane.
If you're sane enough to be insane you must be well enough to confront fear well enough to fight I'll indulge your flight of fantasy with a game.
Do the sane play games?
Yes I'll treat you sane with a game let's play a game.
What kind of game?
A game imaginary game of war imagine outside tell me what you feel outside the outpost. Imagine the sand your boots sink in the sand one road parting the sand hot pavement over the sand and booming ruins. A town not a town tread tracks an amalgamation of sand-stone structures bombed out ruins blocks burrowing like mole rats into a goldy-sand wasteland only a video game can imagine. A road to legs splayed under a ruin of stone.
I feel bullets whizzing by my head buried in sand-dunes bullets from ruins lonely echo
Feel the sand down your boots cutting off your toes entombing a soldier his fountain spurting a lovely oasis and ask yourself if you knew him? Not the same game your childhood game.
Crazy legs mine splayed over carpet...
A game a game my leg for a game my arm for a game my life for a game oh what I would give for a game!
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Hey Brett! So I just wanted to write and say that I really appreciated this poem although you incorrectly entitled it "Terrible..." I thought you had nice language play here and also an extremely quick but flowing rhythm. Some of the other moments that I liked were your rhetorical devices, especially alliteration. I always am attracted to a piece that can suck me in with the pure sound of the words. You play a lot with the "s" sound from the "sand-stone structures" and also the explosive "b" sound with the "bombed out ruins blocks burrowing..." These create a cool juxtaposition of soft and hard noises, which in itself seems to relate to one of the messages of competing ideas or power in your piece.
ReplyDeleteOne suggestion would be that you return to the idea of sanity or insanity in the end. Perhaps this idea of what is and is not a game in reality is your way or touching on sanity, but I would have like to have seen a tie somehow. Great work though...not terrible!
Brett,
ReplyDeleteI always enjoy reading your work. I like this one especially because of the imagery that juxtaposes a soldier in war and a child playing "war."
A road to legs splayed under a ruin of stone.
Crazy legs mine splayed over carpet...
These two images reach out and grab the reader, and force them to look at what is really going on. What is the difference between actual war and imagining war? There is the physical aspect of it and the mental aspect of it. What's to say that someone playing a video game -shooting the enemy, hiding in the shadows, waiting for someone to attack- can't get in a mindset that is as destructive as the real thing. I'm sure this is a very contradictory statement, but maybe you could play with the politics of how war affects people and how the media affects to people.
I thought the repetition of ideas- sane, insane, & game was very effective. I would work with this more and keep creating pieces like this. Keep up the "great (not terrible)" work.
A really neat piece of experimental work. I like the start of the narrator questioning his/her own sanity. It immediately casts the rest of the poem in a state of doubt (for the reader) as to whether to believe the narrator, which makes the reader question everything, which in part makes the reader, in retrospect, question their own sanity. You toy back with them (the readers) at the end talking about the games...was this text a game? Was this narrator? It brings up questions of reality, and the narration takes place (in my mind at least) in a strange sort of dream scape. You utilize your sentences to really emphasize this, repeating in the beginning, lulliing the reader into the alliteration, and boom, something pops out: "Imagine the sand your boots sink in the sand one road parting the sand hot pavement over the sand and booming ruins." -booming ruins ,for me, really boomed with sudden imagery. So, to sum up my own insanity, I like the piece, I like the struggles it plays with the readers' own mind and I like the commentary it seems to make on war.
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