*poof*
Doped with Religion, Sex and TV “Working class hero, my foot,” Darleen spat. “Pampered British rock star’s more like it. He don’t know nothin’ about no working class,” she sneered, “and that Jap witch he married. She’s probly the one who put them ideas in his head.” Darleen and I worked on the assembly line at the Capitol Records plant, putting fresh-pressed LPs into sleeves, the packaged albums into cardboard boxes, the boxes onto pallets for the forklift guy to take them away to the loading dock. “I used to like some of them early songs. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ but you can have this stuff. Working class hero! Who does he think he’s kidding?” I stuffed my impulse to defend Lennon, point out his poverty in postwar Liverpool, the broken family, the absent sailor father; mainly offended by Doreen’s naked racism, pitying her for the misogyny she’d absorbed from generations of farmers on the prairie. I was a college student, working part...
Nice bomb although I suspect the eventual explosion to be mild and quickly doused with mist. If the world was filled with fathers like you, my, what a better place it would be.
ReplyDeleteFrom a technical perspective I think, at least from my reading, that the 'unfortunately' in the last two stanzas do not do the work that you intended, unless you intended the ambiguity. You wanted to mean that it is unfortunate that is was necessary to teach that lesson, right, not that it was unfortunate that you did? The quick fix 'I have had to..' breaks the repetition though, unfortunately. ;-)
Again, beautiful writing. Bravo!
I think you're right. When I recast it's probably going to be a couple stanzas longer, as I've had some ideas since writing it. I wanted the ambiguity at first, now I'm not so sure. Thanks Gerry!
ReplyDeletenot sure i understand the bomb idea but i love this, especially the last line
ReplyDeleteWell, I sort of thought it was a weakish poem that I could improve later, ergo poetry-bomb. I'm glad you like it though!
ReplyDelete