31
votes
Ode to the cute boy I met from Surrey
Pork bun; pot belly; spare me the tears;
I'm getting on; you're getting old; you're getting off here.
I can't quite tell; it's hard to see; you're somewhere in my mind;
Or is it me? It's hard to see; you're losing—
I think I'll try. No, no, I won't.
This happens sometimes. All the time.
I think. Do I forget?
A half forgotten memory. Still vaguely tinged with some regret
A story as old as public transit
So many missed chances
So many regrets
Cute girls please say something
Sitting in our bubbles
We forgot how to pop
Maybe we never knew
But now the train comes to a stop
He was sitting in his prison
Dared not move dared not speak
For he doesn’t want to be the creep
Instead he sat there pleading
Cute girl please say something
incoherent, unedited, and probably incomplete, but it's not bad and the first time i've been inspired to write in forever so i'm taking it
also i thought i got rid of the slant rhyme on the second line but it seems to have come back lol call it a chiasmus i guess. also i really like the metric structure of the second stanza it's pleasantly weird. kinda like a [(]) kinda thing or something (except probably three of them? ed- yeah at least 3 lol i love it so much) i haven't tried to tease it apart yet
cursory analysis i wrote last night (i.e., some stuff i noticed, including some auctorialism, for which i hope i can be forgiven):
The first two lines of the second stanza you expect to be 'I think I'll try. No, no, I won't. / This happens all the time.' 'Sometimes' throws you off (not enough syllables!), but it's all right because we return to normalcy and finish out the line the way we expected. This also establishes the syntactic structure of the stanza: similar to the first, but different; two sentences per line, rather than three clauses offset by semicolons. Then the second+third and fourth lines seem to form a nice couplet (pseudo-enjambment?), which is almost very nice rhythmically, except that the 'couplet' starts on an even numbered line (syncopation?). At the same time, though, it's not just the release of suspense at the end of the second line, and not just the line structure (which you could almost ignore if you wanted to), but also the syntactic structure and in particular the pauses at the sentence breaks which seem to say that it is in fact lines three and four that are the (slant) rhyming couplet and this really is just an ordinary quartet.
Originally, I meant 'getting on' in the sense of 'getting on in years' (and originally the first two lines rhymed: 'tears' / 'years', I think; I changed that because I didn't like it, but they seem to have ended up in slant-rhyme anyway. nice chiasmus, I guess). Getting old is of course like getting on. 'Getting off' can be a double entendre (now 'getting on' can be 'mounting' and also perhaps 'getting it on'; and then are you getting old because I'm sucking the youth out of you?), but for the straight line, summon a train or similar for you to disembark from (which feels like a metaphor for dying given the talk of aging), and for the triple entendre let me embark on the train in the first clause. @metoosalem now you see how I got here—I think I actually didn't notice the straight throughline at all until I read your response! :s it is really nice that it's there though
I don't yet have much that's useful to say about the rest of the first stanza or about the piece as a whole.
happy to be an inspiration
honestly i have no background in poetry
i just write what comes to mind
and i hate trains
I read this without noticing it was you who had wrote it and thought "Well that's horribly unfair!" I think it's a great piece, one that is easy to slip into and feel those feels yourself. Kudos for making it so approachable and engaging; and I hope you can be easier on yourself with the feedback!