i loved this in terms of your students. of loved the battles in your pockets. it made me remember how in highschool i would fold up little poems in my pockets and carry them until the creases were tearing and i could barely read the pencils lines. all the important things. everything is magnified and sometimes i think it's foolish, sometimes it's just beautiful. and sometimes i need to sit and watch them and hold onto that immediacy. point being, i loved your poem, because i still can't pick my battles.

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For a long time there were only your footprints & laughter in our dreams & even from such small things, we knew we could not wait to love you forever.
~ Brian Andreas

I am fascinated by the concept of the dust of mud summer. It reminds me of private summers (hot flashes) ... and how the light still tempts me through the blinds. It brings back to me how the greener grass just points to greener grass. I am rambling.

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Artists are magical helpers. Evoking symbols and motifs that connect us to our deeper selves, they can help us along the heroic journey of our own lives.
Joseph Campbell

War is the difficult thing. But, it's all in terms of your body, hidden discretely by your clothes, and yeah in Highschool the battle is biological as much as anything. I'm pretty sure that sticking teenagers in a confined space was never a good idea to begin with. But here we are, faced with it. I quite like the last few lines:

I sealed all my battles
in the lining of long skirts, the hems of babydoll tees,
knowing you’d never smell them sneaking through the door

Though, I'm sure the image is referring to something extremely personal, but I can't help but think to myself, it's to catastrophic when our battles start at that age, but it's so quiet and unsaid. The only thing that's truly obvious is that the battles are occuring, but what are they? Do any of us really want to know?

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What I don't know will never hurt me, cannot forget cannot remember, this information is forever... missing time -MDMFK

-DoomiT-

This seems like two poems mashed together, or one longer poem too truncated. I like the second poem better, but then the awkward thrashings of adolescence is always fascinating to me. Those last two stanzas seem related to the first three, but I'm not sure how, I didn't make the leap with the speaker, and lacking that leap it's hard to understand how the pieces fit together.

My last nit-picky detail is that I don't personally think of battles as smell-worthy, so the allusion to something more literal than battle is lost on me, and leaves me more confused than satisfied.

A.

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www.strangejournal.com

Alright, loveness.

There seems to be YOUR battles in this poem, and then your students battles. Now, I get how they're connected, but as far as the poem is concerned, I want them to either (1) be woven together more, or (2) be two separate poems/explorations.

The first stanza really pulls me in. I get this image of parents pointing and patios and teenage battles piled outside the door. It helps that I have solid images for all these things, since I half lived at your house during those year. *smile*

Also loving the imagery of the last two stanzas, and again, I get how they connect. I appreciate the second and third stanzas, but for me, those are the ones that could be stronger and that want to be a separate poem. I think you could delve into that more.

Also, I love you.

Ahh it's awesome how youth is personified so easily in the things we wear, how our level of war with society is the makeup and the jewelry. And how often the change from a person being at war with society is transformed silent. Teacher's are in a great position they see the angsty feelings of their students without having to adopt that lifestyle, as they have already overcome it. It's great how people slowly assimilate to society around them.