Matt's poems

Slip Away

My guess is this poem is about a tense stage at the end of a relationship, and then the end of it, when the addressed in the poem 'slips away.'

'Silence was the answer to the questions we sustained,' to me suggests a tense stage at the end of the relationship when the end seems nigh and yet at least one of the participants is unwilling to accept it -- if I'm right, I think that's a good way to describe it. 'In me something sparkled as some form of bliss,' is a vivid way to describe what bliss feels like inside. 'Churning,' is a good word choice, it's very suggestive as well, for some reason to me almost onomatopoeic. I also like the idea of 'traction' drawing you towards something -- but what 'fate'? Breaking up with this person? There's a lot of good elements in this poem, but I really object to the 'all alone. all alone. all alone' at the end. If something is 'churning in the dark' like the repeated pistons of machinery repeating 'all alone, all alone,' like it really is onomatopoeic, and it doesn't just stand alone. But by itself, it's a teensy trite.


Untitled

Someone is profoundly unhappy. Possibly from a dream deferred.

I read the second stanza a little wrong, so to say 'When you cannot pin the culprit/All the world has bloody hands.' I still like that, even if I read it wrong. And I do like the concept of mainlining on dreams. What if you took that concept and made that metaphor the whole poem? As it stands, the poem's a little sparse, but the idea of injecting hope into your bloodstream is, to me, compelling, and you mention the cravings here. A desperate addiction to dreams? That's something substantial, something I can grasp, and less abstract than the first two stanzas of your poem.