Wednesday, March 3, 2010

My Ode

I adapted the structure (loosely) of Carson's "Ode to Sleep" to write a poem about a band. Played with Antlers lyrics in places, in others I was just trying to put into words what listening to them feels like. Their lyrics often involve hospitals, death, etc, so this is what I came up with:

Ode to Antlers

With the door closed, shades drawn, you're dead enough.
The ghosts gather at the foot of your misshapen bed-a hospital bed.
"There's no saving you," the doctors had said and they called you
a hurricane thundercloud
there are no patients, no visitors
just ghastly illusions rolling in with the fog
which-whispering in your ear-will comfort you
if you can drown out the sound
beep. Beep,
the morphine alarm's out of tune, snowy television set out of focus-
but what does it feel like in the mortuary?
Your tears are running hot.
Blood is running icy.
You remember being small and swinging from a tree branch
it snapped and you were falling.
Hundreds of thousands of hospital beds
and all of them empty but yours.



5 comments:

  1. Good adaptation. I especially like the structure of the words. They're spaced out in a way that helps it flow. What does it mean to be dead enough?

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  2. I liked your adaptation. The flow of the piece lies in how you structured it. Powerful imagery.

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  3. I really liked the movement of this piece. You gave it dimension by breaking out of a linear narrative. It worked really well in contrast to the theme of death, left me with a surreal sensation which was cool.

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  4. I loved the lines "Your tears are running hot"
    and "Blood is running icy". Very powerful descriptions that the reader can truly try to imagine. I also liked how you alarmed the readers with the "beep beep". Simple, but clever.

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  5. The examination of the relationship between death and hospitals is well demonstrated in this piece by that blurry experience of being hospitalized. Good use of perspective.

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