Guantanamo Bay

[brianedwards]

Guantanamo Bay

Realizing it's a Saturday I poke
my nose back into the dream
and soon my neighbour's leaking

roof may as well be on a beach
in Florida testing the patience
of a suntanned pensioner

I have archives of repressed
emotion to preserve and almost
forty-eight hours to pull weeds

so switch the TV off and leave
me here in patterned sheets
Where I'm headed there is no news

and I may wash up on a Caribbean shore
welcomed by a bare-chested native
who will feed me the usual fruits

and show me rituals behind tall fences
where bodies are piled high and purple
paint is applied with chains and sticks













~

[ray miller]

Last three verses I like and that's the story, for me, the first three verses are imagining the place vacation style? Don't think you need to, seems superfluous. "purple paint is applied...." is good.

[Travis]

The socially conscious bit lands a little abruptly at the end there, but on the second read the dream bit at the beginning takes care of that, makes it ok. In the end.

S5 is the weakest I think. And only then because "fresh" seems a little too much.

[dillingworth]

i like the dreamy quality to this one - that is the way images elide into one another, which is definitely helped by the lack of punctuation. I'd suggest you go all in and don't capitalize the initial words of sentences e.g. Where I'm headed there is no news - doing so will enhance the nice ambiguities generated by the line breaks.

i didn't feel the last stanza jarred too much - as in a dream there are multiple layers of meaning interacting with each other.

one niggle was "repressed/emotion" - cliche?

[brianedwards]

Thanks for all the looks. Repressed emotions and fresh fruit are, of course, cliche. Kinda the point.

B.

~

[Ros]

May be this one just isn't my type of thing, but I found the voice unconvincing, for all that it's a dream.

Ros

[brianedwards]

It's not a dream.

[Ros]

Dream-like sections, surely? Or am I completely missing the point (again!)

[Travis]

I have no issue with the fresh fruit cliche, but rather with the word "fresh" itself. I think the line would read better without it.

[dillingworth]

if the cliches are kinda the point, what point are they making?