you said
careful, tea is a delicate affair
one must be subtle
and gentle
and oh so careful
with the administration
of a cup of tea
oh no!, said i
you do not understand
tea
as i do
leave the stuff in the
steaming water
know the heat
and bitter flavor
of the tea
know that there is pain
and discomfort of the senses
in tea
that can be pleasure.
know tea
know it for everything that it is
in complete
feel everything that tea
can give
this
is how one should enjoy
a cup of tea
he nodded politely
he didnt invite me over for tea
again
fucking cunt
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Poems, Animals, Lust
Me
- Shai W. Thanatos
- i let my passions get the better of me. undisciplined, very sweet, kind of nerdy, maybe sometimes. poet. naturalist.
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2008
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- SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE
- BESTIARY OF LOST LOVES PT. 1
- the gradual end of nature
- Cephalopodantism
- IT'S NOT MY CUP OF TEA
- Andrew Bird
- so um...did some one say? oh yeah ok. crushing gra...
- 6 self portraits at the family reunion
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2 comments:
The twist at the end: brilliant.
My friend, (as McCain might say)
I really like this piece. I'm going to "workshop" it as we do here at HU. I hope that's ok.
The first part of this works great -- I think it's very effective the way you load tea up with this sort of paradoxical significance that the reader can then read into the metaphor of their choosing (including just "tea"!).
So to that end the first four stanzas work very well. However, the last three feel a bit mismatched to me. That is, starting at the line "he nodded politely," and on to the end.
For the most part, this is because you open the poem with the pronoun "you," yet it becomes "he" at the end. This is a bit jarring. I don't know for certain that it is "wrong" but I do wonder if you had a reason for it or if it was an unconscious oversight?
It would seem more natural, in general, to pick one pronoun or the other and stick with it throughout. If your intention is to shift from addressing the person embodied in "you" to addressing the reader, it might be be a little easier to grasp if there's something to clearly delineate the first portion and the second portion as two separate sections (i.e., numbering each, or extra line breaks, three asterisks, etc).
Again, I wouldn't insist in this case that it's "necessary" but I do think it's worth considering, especially if that's a shift you made without realizing, or based on an intuition that you haven't yet probed.
Also, your rhythm seems to change in the penultimate stanza ("he didnt invite me over for tea / again") -- that feels different from the rhythm of your earlier line breaks, and I can't see that it contributes anything by being different. Based on your earlier breaks, I would expect this one to read more like "he didn't invite me / over for tea again" or something like that.
I'm not adept at analyzing rhythm in formal terms (I just catch it by ear) but I think the difference is in part that this is nearly the longest line in the poem followed by the nearly the shortest. For the most part you've got shorter lines, and even your longer ones are carried along afterwards by several subsequent syllables. This one seems to hit a wall and stop against the abruptness of the two syllables, "again." Drawing that sort of attention to the couplet might be effective for a major revelation, but this couplet feels more like the natural direction the poem should go in, not a jarring departure, and so having a jarring departure in rhythm feels out of step.
Lastly, the last line is amusing but to me it feels a bit too pointed, out of place in this piece. For the most part this poem reads as a subtle indictment of the speaker's over-eagerness, which suggests a certain self-recognition -- recognizing the mistake after the fact. The last line is a funny retort, but it doesn't quite feel earned and it undermines that sense of self-recognition.
I could still see a place for a closing retort -- that paradoxical sense of wanting to lash out at someone for the problem we ourselves caused -- but in that case I think it should be more Sedaris-like and still embody that sense of self-damnation at the same time that you try to cut the other person down. In other words, it needs to be double-edged, whereas "fucking cunt" is a barb that pricks only the other person in this poem.
Those tweaks aside, though, I think this is very well done. (And I trust that you'll simply take my opinions as such, and regard or disregard them as is useful to you to do so.)
Thanks for keeping at this -- it's good to read good stuff and I've appreciated your steady development.
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