Poetry Forum

Your hollow soporific mutter melts

Into the walls, which sweat the

Brand of cherryade I so desire.


Stop confining my ideas to the

Shredder, your paper back look

Reeks of the morning after.


And I can see that red light

Glaring in the corner, a steady

Whirring as the observers paradox'

Taps you on the shoulder.


Your polar explanations seem

Disquietingly similar, needless

To say they slide into one ear,

Then ooze fluidly out the other.


The air today is typical of

Summer, spread sparely yet dense

With the desperate whimpers

Of the boiled over.





Hey everyone,

First thing I've posted in a while, feedback would be very much appreciated..

Do say if you think the rhyme is too constant, damaging the poem.

atb

raps.

ps. home for good now so will make effort to post and comment as much as possible..

What rhyme?

was my first question - it's there, insistent, but not intrusive: "mutter-desire-shredder-after" etc. I really liked this: the language is so dense I found it hard to grasp but it's not so difficult as to prove off-putting. I liked the way you took the cliche "in one ear out the other" and made it so repulsively physical. I'm still not sure what "the observers paradox" is.

As I'm relatively new this is the first thing of yours I've read - will look up more of your stuff on old threads as this is cracking.

hi dillingworth,

thanks for the feedback

im glad you didnt think the rhyme ruined it, my main worry was that it relied too much on the 'er' and 're' sounds..

'the observers paradox': normally only pedantic linguistics students like myself know what it is, but see if you can work it out from the content?

ill check out your stuff too, ive been away and since returning have found a whole host of new names and poetry to familiarize myself with!

all the best

rasputin

Having done a cursory amount of research, I think the observers' paradox basically means that when you try to observe something that observation is immediately undermined because your subject's behaviour changes under observation. Assuming the "you" is a teacher, then I think what you're saying is that your observation of the teacher changes their behaviour, as they realize you're looking at them and turn round (as if tapped on the shoulder?) or react in some way.

By the way, if you are as you say a "pedantic linguist", shouldn't "observers paradox" have an apostrophe? I couldn't decide if it was singular or plural.

One more thing about the rhyme: I realized it creates a constant "er" sound, quite appropriate for a classroom in which thick kids might well make that same noise!

aha - right you are dillingworth, pedantry again overshadowed by my laziness..

as for the context, you were spot on, although in this case the 'observers' paradox' was personified, while retaining its conceptual form..

atb.