Haibun 4/6/22- How We Shine

Poem

I feel this solitude tonight. The terraced apartment, separated by who did and who didn’t, the feeling of my roommates succumbing to internal gestations of feelings, love and loss. The garish lights expunge themselves inside of me- I am fluorescent, and my atoms are in a trial of who will shine and who won’t. I shine subconsciously, without remorse, but feeling all the same afterwards- whether I did or didn’t. When do we shine? I like to think I do in the mornings and then I repent for my shining at night. It’s a manic-depressive eulogy, every day, every night. And how playful is the energy that runs from fingertip to eyelash and down to the fuzzy stomach and knees and feet. I like it, even if it makes me feel nearly ill at the end of the day. My friends, my roommates, sometimes we are riding on the same wavelength of energy. How the energy coalesces so easily. The emotion inside us is uncovered like a fossil and yet outside of us, where it connects, we can see it clear as day, it needs no unsheathing, lurid above the candlelight. And yet we are more aware of our sole singular internal heat rather than the connection of our others. How contradictory.

Internal heat- breath,

A hot saucepan’s emotion,

Or lurid candle

External feelings-

The sizzled smoke comes to a

Stop- the unsheathed night

1 and 2

Posted Apr 7, 2022, 2:40 PM UTC

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Rococco_art_is_taken•4 yr. ago

Always nice to read you Haibuns! You've got a great nack for making the reader feel included and welcome. Keep it up :)

pydgeon•4 yr. ago

Ok so, I love what you’ve laid out, but I feel that it’s lacking crucial elements of shape, like a beautiful length of fabric still waiting to be sewn into a dress, the fit and form of which only enhancing what was already great about the fabric (if that makes sense). If this were a piece I was working on the next step I would take is to start cutting, cropping, and pasting, moving lines around, swapping out or adding in or removing some words (one of the fun parts of poetry is ignoring most rules in language structure regarding fluff fillers, comprehension etc). Put pen to physical paper, give each part of each sentence it’s own line, see the patterns start to emerge. Like I said, it doesn’t need a lot, but I feel it’s a disservice to your craft to leave a story like this when it could shine so much brighter!

Edited to clarify

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FL0AT1N•4 yr. ago

WOW. Really love this. Everything works really well together:

I understood the theme as manic depressive, and I like that it was explicitly mentioned so that it's super clear. The whole beginning part kept going back and forth between describing your feelings and your environment.

"I feel this solitude tonight. The terraced apartment, separated by who did and who didn’t, the feeling of my roommates succumbing to internal gestations of feelings, love and loss. The garish lights expunge themselves inside of me- I am fluorescent, and my atoms are in a trial of who will shine and who won’t."

and I feel like that really worked to make me feel the manic depressiveness, of going back and forth between what you later describe.

the imagery here is amazing:

"The emotion inside us is uncovered like a fossil and yet outside of us, where it connects, we can see it clear as day, it needs no unsheathing, lurid above the candlelight"

thinking of our bones as fossils is a cool, new way I hadn't imagined them before, and tying that together with our outward energy, this almost magnetic field around us that connects us together brings this spiritual and almost scientific energy to the poem. Love it.

the ending. it's nice how it breaks it up so you don't just end with the last sentence in that big paragraph. the way you break the line right before stop is a great emphasis for the end as well.

Only piece of advice I could think of is you could probably get rid of the 'And' and just start with 'How' in this line:

"And how playful is the energy that runs from fingertip to eyelash and down to the fuzzy stomach and knees and feet"