So painfully carefully I must walk,
husbanding my precious inner pitfalls,
twitchingly vigilant against the world,
and hyper-attuned to disappointment,
Compulsively reciting litanies
of each thing's potential to do me harm,
each person's potential for treachery,
each place's potential imprisonment
Tight-lacing my armor of self-restraint
self-hobbled against bolting from my fears
the price an inability to act
hording my reserves of strength jealously
against my panic's sapping exhaustion
Compression chokes up nervous babbling,
(both a diversion and a substitute
against my weak yearnings for connection)
quickly dismissed and easily ignored,
created only to be rejected;
goading me to scramble further inside,
baffled in choking swaths of apathy
against desire and stark disregard,
starving in my hollow shell of my self
for want of company
Why a semi colon?
ReplyDeleteWhy all the hypens?
Why lots of semis, not not consistently?
Tight-lacing? Try "Lacing tight"
Parenthesis mess with the flow. recommend remove them
The semi-colon is there to break up the stanzas somewhat more than a simple comma would, mostly as a hint for rhythm when the poem is being read aloud.
ReplyDeleteThe hyphen between self and restraint and the one between hyper and attuned I have taken out. Tight-lacing is actually a reference to corseting. Self-hobbled is hyphened because I wanted to give the phrase a certain hitching emphasis, especially highlighting that the hobbling is inherently done by the self and no other.
I am not certain what you mean by "lots of semis, not not consistently."
I played around with the phrase that now contains a parenthesis a great deal and the correct meaning simply does not come through any other way. The stanza becomes muddied and confusing without them.