The Tangled Branch Discussion Forums

An interesting exercise in prose-poetry. Direct dialogue is tricky in poetry but this is well-executed. I think further forays into this narrative form complete with orthodox punctuation would serve both your poetry and prose writing, in different ways.

Mundane is the word that comes to mind but only in a mundane way,

Thanks for your take, guys. Linda, my thoughts were along the lines of your second possibility, how it is the woman he remembers best but there is a sense of the surreal and I also like the ambiguity you found. Cheers, Mark. 

. An old man, blank with an iron cancer, walks along a dock on a Sunday afternoon. Seagulls wheeling, gray clouds on blue,   a distant foghorn mourns across the water. Random kaleidoscopes, thoughts of Rome, grim impressions of sinister things forgotten, loom opaquely, uncertain as a yellow mist. A...

Enjoyed the poem and the discussion. Some dreams are such a mind-fuck that we realize just how filtered our reality can be. 

Linda. I enjoyed both your poem and editorial, especially the last, astute, paragraph. I know nothing about carrier pigeons but do recognize a good metaphor on occasion. A nicely-turned out and semi-whimsical narrative. One point of interest - some of these equinox oriented megalithic structures don...

Yeah, I enjoyed the write. Fitting yourself into a behavioral template with metaphysical overtones means not having to think too much or even at all. Each to their own code, credo and creed but keep the proselytizing out of the conversation, right? And what's with this bipolar Antichrist stuff... wh...

I do think the second version is better although the first version's ending seems more authentic. I don't know the reason he left. Love? Gold? War? And I don't know if a dirt road is a good simile for ancient. I also don't know how well that amount of repetition serves the poem. Sorry to be negative...

An easy reading and enjoyable narrative. The transition is well handled. As the narrator identifies with the characters, so we readers engage with the narrator. My only question is, when does a stick become a log?

What an intriguing and bold title. Very descriptive word pictures with olfactory effects. Like Gyppo, I've been in this shed too, that sense of oil and dust accumulating as grime, slowing down time if not the decay. Stuff that was put down by someone not realising it was the last time. Absorbing rea...