Poem: Prerequisites

[lettered]

What: A Jossverse poem, free verse, very very short.
Why: for stultiloquentia, because she always rocks my world.
A/N: I suck at poetry. But it's fun to try.

Prerequisites

You must understand her wrists, her pulse-point wrists, murderous wrists.
Broken, they'd scent the air like cinnamon sticks.
You must taste her kisses, her messianic kisses, Life-Savers red cherry kisses.
Fucked, they blossom and she pops, like waiting champagne fizz.
You must see her sleep, after-sex sleep, picture perfect, surrender sleep.
Sketched, she'll be drawn and pale as paper.
You must fathom her forgiveness, her "you're a man" forgiveness, your treacherous, hated love, tousled in the sheets.
You must love this girl
To kill her.

Comments

[cordelianne.livejournal.com]

I love this! You have marvelous imagery, it's very evocative.

I adore the use of pulse-point because it emphasizes her blood, and its rhythm is like a pulse. Describing Buffy's wrists as murderous is great juxtaposition to the next line, which makes it have more impact.

I like that her kisses are described as messianic and Life-Savers red cherry because they have similar meanings (saving) yet simultaneously very different meanings (something transcendent vs candy you buy in a store).

You must see her sleep, after-sex sleep, picture perfect, surrender sleep. I like how you disrupt the alliteration in the line with a different alliteration which recalls pulse-point from the first line.

The use of drawn in the next line is excellent. It feels like the sentence is saying two things at once because of drawn's double meaning (considering the murderous thoughts in this, there's also the "drawn and quartered" meaning as well).

The final two lines are excellent! I like how the second last line has no punctuation, unlike all the previous lines, because it causes a pause and briefly separates You must love this girl from the final line. It gives that line emphasis on its own, yet it is never entirely divorced from the last line because it is all one sentence, so the two lines ultimately connect.

So I don't think you suck at poetry! This is a really wonderfully layered and beautiful poem to read. Every time I re-read it I catch something I didn't previously. :)

[tkp.livejournal.com]

Day-um but your fb rocks, girl! You caught all the things I was trying to do and some of the things I didn't even mean to...for instance, I didn't even intend for the picture perfect alliteration to recall pulse-point, but it does and that's a cool way of looking at it. I also hadn't considered the "drawn and quartered" meaning of "drawn"...I was just going for the most basic wordplay there. It's not often someone can show me things I didn't purposely insert into something I've written, so thanks so much for doing so and for your kind words! I'm glad you enjoyed it.