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Poetry


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married to sherlock

By alandavidpritchard

02 March 2006

Don’t look for me in silences,
the echoes are too loud;
and my miniscule, unconscious shrug
is not significant.

Don’t scrape away at the surface of my words,
or suck on them like those sweets
you used to repeatedly remove from your mouth
to reveal the layers of alternating colours when you were a kid.

They’re all the same flavour. It is just what it is.

Stop searching for clues in every gesture,
stop looking for evidence for implausible hypotheses;
nothing is meant to be deduced or inferred –
you’ll only flounder in a fishpond of fallacy.

I don’t love you how or miss you why
or even ponder if –
there is no programme of deliberate ambiguity.

There is nothing to pan for along the streams of your insecurity;
no nuggets to invest in the bank of your misguided concern.

I am neither a pun nor a metaphor for your needs,

but I do so love
being the focus of
your attention.

Reviews

Written by amboline (183 comments posted) 7th March 2006

There are some great ideas in this, and some superb black humour that I really enjoyed. I wasn't sure if this was supposed to be an actual Mrs. Holmes narrating (a la Carol Ann Duffy's "The World's Wife"), or a contemporary version (the gobstopper in stanza 2 suggests the latter) but I loved the opening stanza and the punchline anyway.

I felt that bits of the middle section were very unwieldy. Try reading stanza 1 aloud (it's superb) and then compare with, say, stanza 2 ("Don't scrape away") or 4 ("Stop searching for clues") - the words seem much heavier on the tongue, much less elegant. Some of the alliteration you've used in these stanzas actually seems to make me trip over the words, rather than enhancing them (try saying "flounder in a fishpond of fallacy" after a few pints...

). Also, towards the end of the poem you bring in a lot of very abstract words ("ambiguity", "insecurity", "concern", "needs"), which rather disconnect me from the image I've built up in the first few stanzas.

Some of the above could be addressed, on paper at least, by a little bit of judicious re-shaping. The short, clear lines of stanza 1 are very effective, and the poem will certainly be easier on the reader's eye if you can break down some of the more rambling lines later on into sets of 2 or 3 lines, ideally with one idea to each line. A slightly lighter touch on the alliteration would make the piece flow much more gracefully off the tongue too.

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