Ladylike
Mon, 22 Oct 2007 at 09:20am
untitled
Are my growing fingernails feminine?
or should I be wearing a skirt in high heels?
maybe let my hair down to my shoulders
to blow upward in window gusts.
I could pretend it's the fifties,
aproned dresses in the kitchen,
triumphant oven-mitted hands retrieving freshly baked oven goods.
Spend decades showing smooth leg of social acceptability
dress nice, iron, cook, clean, smile!
Empress! Find a husband to read the paper at his breakfast table.
Off to school, to work, this is the wondrous time alone
to relax and hang the masque of gracious motherhood up to dry clean.
I can put my unslippered feet up on the coffee table,
watch sordid movies on a big screen, take advantage of cable on demand.
Let my bunned hair flow down the couch cushion
and watch my legs grow pricks of hair while I pop popped-corn in to my mouth,
marking the height it achieves before plunging in to a delipsticked maw.
My goal is six feet.
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Line 1; "Is growing my..." fix.
L6: " Aproned dresses in the kitchen" implies more than one person, which I don't think you're going for.
L8: "Empress!" Do you mean "impress"? If not, be more clear about what you're talking about.
L12: Bringing "motherhood" into it at this stage is a bit non-sequitur, since you haven't mentioned children before.
In conclusion, although I can guess what the poem is about, it doesn't mkae it clear enough whether you're in favor of the life you desribe or not. The last two lines dip into a different tone than the rest of the poem, making their intent unclear.
Overall, I did not enjoy the poem and was unimpressed by it. However, your writing shows an adequate control of the English language, and some potential. I encourage you to keep writing.
Well, you asked for criticism. There ya go.
I started this in a truck, staring at my fingertips and savoring the blowing wind. Once I arrived at my destination, however, I began to think how women were seen in the past (ie: the fifties when dresses were everyday attire and the overall image of women in that time)
Then I sort of construed the whole thing by putting it back in to present times so quickly with motherhood and all. You're right too, I did mean impress.
I did have more originally but I wanted to end it in an offbeat way and decided to stop abruptly instead.
Ah well. Be sure that is, in fact the case, not laziness. i often stop writing poems before they're finished because I want to, say. go watch Scrubs, and I always regret it.
"Empress" and "motherhood" could easily be the correct choice of words for the message you're getting across. I think they carry a fair amount of meaning to make them work here. Just make sure you don't lose track of what you're trying to say on the whole, perhaps.
And this was my first real stab at poetry. I've been reading alot of Ginsburg as of late and it's got my mind jumbled. I like to write poetic things but when I put it in a format as a poem, it looks all wrong. I guess poetry will never be my forte, but I'm okay with that.