Give me darkness.
Give me the sombre
light of a place whose
contours are hard to make out,
a place, a
space, a landscape
that lets my imagination run
backways through
time to create a sense
of where I am now.
A world filled with too
much light does not
leave room for the
flawed and broken.
Does not leave room
for my imagination to
re-cast outlines of
whatever lies in view.
On the periphery.
Beyond the middle.
And why wouldn’t you call it a poem? Nowadays a poem is pretty much whatever the writer decides to call a poem but without getting all technical about it the common man knows a poem when he sees one, usually becuase he doesn’t get it right away. Or at all. Prose tends to explain itself and do set-ups. Poetry just dives right in there and expects its readers to pull their weight and make it their own. This is especially true where there a first person narrator because when we read it although we know the “I” isn’t us (and may not even be the poet) it’s hard not to feel like it might be us, to empathise more than we would with a character in a novel. So, when I read this I find myself not imagining your darkness but remembering my own darknesses. I would’ve laid it out a little differently although, to be fair, I’ve always had a bit of an issue with line breaks and I’ve read a lot about them trying to frame some set of rules in my head only to be befuddled by the choices well-known poets have made especially those who break in the middle of a word. I mean, seriously, guys! For my own tastes I would’ve broken this into stanzas rather than a single block of text but, as I said, that’s just my preference. The question I always ask is what’s to be gained by doing it a certain way. Also, I’m not sure you need that last line but I can see me putting it in and taking it out for days on end before finally abandoning the thing. Anyway, poem or whatever you want to call it, I like it.