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Authors Note: I'm pulling this directly out of the Poetry Journal I've also posted here as an 'Article'. Enjoy!
First Rendition:
Adulthood (tentative title)
Andrew Poff
December 2nd, 2008
First of all
I'm deeply worried
About the bones I've buried
I'm the PVC filled
Cotton eyed man
I ridiculed when I said
The old are lifeless and boring
My blood's a zinc stop watch
And I've been given
Rudimentary hinges
So that I can walk
No wonder my joints ache when I get up in the morning
And when you see me in my yard
In the morning
Feverishly digging
Hole after six foot hole
Okay, I didn't like the rhythm all that much, and felt the unique images needed a little more help. So I tried to give it a syllabic structure.
Second Rendition
Adulthood
Andrew Poff
December 2nd, 2008
First of all I'm deeply worried
About the blood-white bones I've burried
I'm all stuffed up with PVC
Cut with a bone saw close at hand
I'm the blood-blue cold and cotton eyed man
Of whom I made fun when I was young
-and said
The old are lifeless and boring
Makeshift hinges I've been given
With metal pins... so I can walk
And do my work and eat my food
And fuck my wife and hate my life
No wonder my joints ache and creak
When I get up in the morning
And am feverishly digging
Hole after six foot hole
In a grid
In my backyard
I found
My dog
--
Already I can see a lot of changes that need to be made. “And do my work and eat my food” is a little dry. I'm not sure if I want to go with a rhyme scheme or not. Many more. Anyway, The bits about PVC pipe and cotton eyes come from an ex-girlfriend of mine who worked for a company that drove and flew around from hospital to hospital and butchered deceased people with little hearts on their driver's licenses. I have one too. I considered taking it off, but then figured my liver would be happy to volunteer for drug and alcohol studies, as would my lungs. They'd love the attention. The part about them taking eyes creeped me out for a long long time though. Sure, it's not like your eyes last very long in your body after you die, but for some reason thinking of them preserved and staring willy-nilly from a jar for even more than 10 seconds is deeply disturbing. Back to the poem. When they take bones from dead people, they replace them with PVC pipe, the eyes, apparently, with spare gauze. The opening line about burying bones has several connotations. Dogs bury bones to store and hide them. People bury things to hide and forget them. The bones being buried represent the hoarding of youth through nostalgia as well as the repression of youthful thoughts and desires. The poem is a result of a powerful fear I have lately that my adaptation to the pressures of adulthood will cause me to bury my emotions. My father was extremely distant, for the little that I knew him. Distance has always had an appeal to me, but it puts things away, and they fester, and simultaneously you long for them. So he character in the poem is digging up his back yard in a desperate search for his own real “bones”, having trouble because society has given him stiff and unwieldy replacement constructs that his body is beginning to loathe, and in the process of digging, he finds his old dog, a symbol for nostalgia, and an ironic device. I wish the poem were better because it's sure stuffed with implications.
------
Siredwinsantos@gmail.com
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Automaton (sans Commentary)
