every other day i see him, he tells me that he has a poem for me. it can be one of a few. i’m not sure how many he has in total, but they have started to repeat.
it has a lot of internal rhymes. they’re common rhymes.
7/30/22: i got the angel poem today. it’s about enjoying your life while it lasts and that’s all i’ll say on that topic.
this one heavily uses alliteration, though always in the form of adjectives alliterating with their adjacent nouns: “supple skin,” for instance. the form is used so often that it quickly becomes the only thing you notice.
7/31/22: coworker was in the line of fire for another poem today, and this time i tried to pay attention to the rhyme scheme and meter.
the rhyme scheme is a consistent aabb, which is to be expected, and the line length is all over the place. it creates an uncanny feeling because the lines feel very prosaic, yet the rhymes keep coming back to remind you that this isn’t meant to just be prose.
i’ve been struggling with how to evaluate his poetry, if only so i can give a reasonable answer should someone happen to ask me how good it is. i wanna classify it as naive art, but sorting it into that box requires challenging my incorrect association of naivete with unstructuredness. the romantic in me is tempted to assume that naive works emerge unfiltered from the id, and the words that come out represent what was really in there (even as all good sense and experience tells me that creating art never works that way). so, from that perspective, resorting to alliteration and introducing a rhyme scheme constitutes the adulteration of that supposed vision (even as all good sense and experience tells me that creating art is always a dialogue between intent and form).
but this really wants to be poetry! even children learn to imitate the forms they see and hear, and this is no exception. but also as in the works of children, the form just might be as deep as it goes.
alliteration. rhyme. categories that can be found on poetry’s wikipedia page, checkboxes to be marked. here, these all exist as decoration. they exist to make it feel like what it wants to be.
and truthfully, i don’t feel much of anything past the decoration. i don’t feel the imminence or directness that a life lived under duress would yearn to speak into existence for someone else. i don’t feel the esoteric adoration that a life grounded by a schizophrenic understanding of religion would foster. instead, his sentiments are as common as anybody else’s. despite seeing what few have ever seen, and knowing what few would even wish to know, he writes about experiences that we all could have for ourselves at one point or another. perhaps this humanizes his work, but it also makes it incredibly bland out of context.
he is also the first person i’ve met here who might actually try to kill me.