Join the Neopoet online poetry workshop and community to improve as a writer, meet fellow poets, and showcase your work. Sign up, submit your poetry, and get started.

the girl in the red dress

gulls shriek a grey hunger
across my field of silence
morning ripens into Monday
and the dance begins,

cars whizz into traffic jams, doors slam
the world coming in and going out,
dogs bark their allegiance, the morning's Hallelujah chorus
still singing their bird song as if nothing else
mattered,

it was a good weekend, now locked into the
trunk of memories, I apologized to you,
perhaps already forgiving myself for being
the girl in the red dress, confident and
tearing out your eyes with the lust of longing,
I was young and filled with the arrogance
of red,
an open flower for hungry tongues.

you didn't know me
then, when my cheeks were soft
as petals
and my stride was long-legged

we missed a lifetime together
and the days are shorter now.

Review Request (Intensity): 
I want the raw truth, feel free to knock me on my back
Editing stage: 

Comments

very much! You give your impressions of Monday morning with the remembrances of the weekend past in succinct sentences that we can all relate to. Only crit. is the use of red twice. Could you maybe use crimson or scarlet? ~ Gee

There is value to commenting and critique, tell us how you feel about our work.
This must be the place, 'cause there ain't no place like this place anywhere near this place.

Hi Gee, thanks for reading and your comment. I get so few of them these days. When I first came to Neopoet's shores....ah, well... we can't go back, can we?

I think sometimes the use of a word in a poem more than once strengthens the context. It is a mistake to think otherwise, however, there are times when using another adjective,etc is what is called for, not this time, I think.

Here W.S. Merwin's *The Bones* using sea and sand, bones

...Shells were to shut out the sea,
The bones of birds were built for floating
On air and water, and those of fish were devised
For their feeding depths, while a man's bones were framed
For what? For knowing the sands are here,
And coming to hear them a long time; for giving
Shapes to the sprawled sea, weight to its winds,
And wrecks to plead for its sands. These things are not
Limitless: we know there is somewhere
An end to them, though every way you look
They extend farther than a man can see.

~A

author comment

Red Signifies

Hot blood
And
Slaughter of the human mind…
Sex is best
When the blood is red
And
A man is living waiting
To be dead
Red does calmness compose
To all life ere,
It does finally dispose...

loved

Indeed, red is the colour of life and death. Thanks for reading and the always interesting poem you leave behind, loved.

~A

author comment

Superb writing! Like this a hell of a lot! Wouldn't change a thing! This ROCKS!!!

Namaste,

Lenny

_________________________________________
"Death" is nonsense: what is there to die?
"Life"? How could " life" "die"? That is a contradiction
in terms. Can "light" become "darkness"?
"Light" can only cease to be apparent

Wei Wu Wei

Cool beans, Lenny.

Osho, the man.... breaking down society, one untruth at a time, Did you live in his ashram?

~A

author comment

Not so beautiful, Ian. Youth is arrogant, as if it will be *ours* forever. Age does indeed humble us.

~A

author comment

Ha, I have to *bitch* before someone reads and/or comments?

Thanks Ian, Lenny, Loved & Theo.

Couldn't figure out why the word was underlined in red. Just slipped right past my comprehension.

I'll reread this one with Barry and will work on it. You didn't like shriek their gullness? It's a *veiled reference* to the girl in red who walked down the middle of the street as if she owned it on Sunday,
damned skippy she owned it!

Thanks, Theo I wish you would critique more of my poems, not that I'll listen to you. ;-)

~Ac

~

author comment

Yup, that's exactly what happened. She had the nerve!

Thanks for reading, but not everyone expressed *above reproach*. lol

~A

author comment

Youth is wasted on the young isn't it? lol. A few ideas you can look at :
s-2,l-4 as if nothing else should be in its own line
s-4,l-1 you didn't know me then would read better in one line
last line change are to grow
just a few ideas for you to use or not as you see fit..............stan

Youth is wasted on the young isn't it? lol. A few ideas you can look at :
s-2,l-4 as if nothing else should be in its own line
s-4,l-1 you didn't know me then would read better in one line
last line change are to grow
just a few ideas for you to use or not as you see fit..............stan

If I made neat sentences, I wouldn't be me, now would I? Thanks Sir Scribe,

I don't think it's a waste because we all *own* our youth, would I have changed some things? Hard telling.

~A

author comment

The only word I tripped on is gullness..i wanted to read guileless because the other way is an awkward word in the first line of a poem,perhaps it would slip in somewhere else rather than that first line, it sort of ruined the flow of it for me after than cos I wanted to change the word so badly :)P

Chez
"The perfect woman perpetrates literature as she does a small sin: as an experiment, in passing, to see if anybody notices it - and to makes sure that somebody does." - Nietzsche

Since gullness was so much a sticking point, I changed it.

Much of my poems begins with the day unfolding, since I now live in the city with a factory across the street, it's part of my consciousness. So are gulls as Lake Erie is within walking distance.

Thanks CC I'm considering *guile* because the girl in the red dress is totally cunning, she knows what she isdoing, and enjoys the *effect* of her walk.

Maybe the poem will be rewritten in another manner and I'll remember your suggestion.

~A

author comment

Oh Carmen
your wind-up the skirts
of a young girl
flashes the morning into a night of age,
the wistful scene of everydayness,
its clank and clamour,
winds and gull-blown feathers preened and admired,
now faded
dyed in deeper colours
like the old heavy velvet curtains
that grandmother used to draw across the window
....of life-...a she went to rest,
passing the old trunk as she went.

There's a poem by Halvor Sandsdalen a Norwegian,
that I love, the gist of it is:-

As I went up the stairs
I became aware
of the weight
of the six silver buttons
on my old woollen cardigan...

Then I knew I must be getting old.

This is written in the Seljord dialect which is truly poetic in itself
but then no one here understands that, not even some Oslo people!!!

Love to my Anna( and to Barry) from Ann.

"The image of yourself which you see in a mirror Is dead,
but the reflection of the moon on water, lives." Kenzan.

(c) Neopoet.com. No copyright is claimed by Neopoet to original member content.