Guest Poet Michelle Lerner
Bones
In our bones we are all scream and hunger.
Boiled down to our essentials
that is what is left,
no reasoning or romance
no subtleties of personality
just bones
and the drive to hold them in place.
We are all the same.
Most of us do not realize this
as we purse our lips in the mirror
move our hair this way and that
as we walk along the street thinking about the details
of our lives.
If we were running through the desert
chased by the shockwaves of a bom
hair matted to our heads and necks
a child flung across one arm
the details would all
disappear
again
and we would be left
with our bones
and with the sensation of air
escaping from our chests
thrown back into the fundamental
feeling
of what it is like
to be human.
October, 2001
Michelle Lerner's questions:
1) Does the imagery in this poem work or is it over the top in some way or
some part?
2) Does the punctuation work? My original draft had no punctuation and no
capitalization. I could not decide if that was distracting, or if the way I
have broken it into sentence-like structures without complete pucntuation is
distracting.
This is my first on-line submission. Thank you for considering it.
Editor's Note: Thanks Michelle for trusting your work in this forum.
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