A life like mine

greatscott

I started writing this and now i'm stuck. Any ideas on how to finish it? Is it any good?

Maybe your life is a life-like-mine
with too few hopes and too much time
Procrastinating day till night
when dreamless sleep backslides to light

Do you go out and wish you'd stayed in
as you stand among your drunken kin,
With faked pub-smiles and half-friend nods,
sacrificial gestures to societal gods,

Are Father, Mother, and St Valentine,
hollow Days to fill with wine?

beautiation

I liked it a lot. There's a couple of excellent turns of phrase ("With faked pub-smiles and half-friend nods/sacrificial gestures to societal gods" especially). For how to continue it, I suppose the question I'd ask is, does the narrator feel hope at having maybe recognised a kindred spirit? Does he sense redemption and new understanding in having somebody he can see a bit of himself in? Or is it just final confirmation of his hopelessness, seeing it reflected clearly in another?
If it's hopelessness, then essentially the poem simply becomes about the articulation of despair. Nothing wrong with that, many famous poets made careers out of poems like that. But I would suggest that you should consider using more imagery in this case. It becomes imperative the reader senses you write from a dark place far away, and so you become charged with describing mundanity in a terrifying way. Images and metaphors are the best way to create this impression. Poems of this type have few events in them, so there's no worry that the metaphors will slow it down too much or jar with occurences in the poem.

If it's hope he's feeling however, then it is a work about the desire to break free from society and express himself, and you could use the person like him as representing somebody he could conspire with to escape. If you went in this direction, you could continue to use conjecture, the 2 characters wouldn't even have to meet in the poem. It could create a nicely wistful atmosphere to have the narrator fantasising about escaping with this person and discovering himself, someone who does not procrastinate because he believes in what he is doing. Could work especially well if there's an underlying sense that, because of society and its limits, the "pub-smiles and half-friend nods" he will never have the courage to confront them and make this reality, a final stanza reflecting this sad truth could pack quite an emotional punch if it followed a breathless peak of fantasy in the stanza before.
If you do take this line of approach, read T.S Eliot's "The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock" if you haven't already, you might find some inspiration.
Whatever you do, even if it's nothing to do with my ramblings above, please post it here, k?
Thanks for the read, and good luck!

greatscott

thanks for taking the time to write such a long and practical reply... i never expected anyone to read it that closely!

I haven't read any Eliot, I really like that Prufrock you recommended, but would i be right in saying its a 'difficult' poem? I had to read it a few times. it reminds me a little of Auden; it was Auden's sing-song style in "As I walked out One Evening" that i was badly imitating; its my all time favourite poem; it gets you all light-headed and happy and then scares the **** out of you:

http://www.crocker.com/~slinberg/poems/auden/asiwalked.html

Inspiration doesn't strike me very often but if i ever finish it i'll post it here, thanks again.

Madou

Greatscott, I'm not sure about the final stanza. It seems that perhaps you are trying to introduce an idea that is a bit thematically removed from that of the first two stanzas.

That said, the second stanza is the real winner here. "Do you go out and wish you'd stayed in." So simply put, yet it conjures up sentiments of fear, disaffection, etc. very effectively.

With regards to finishing the piece, I've always been intrigued by watching people talking in bars, seeing mouths move to conversations you'll never hear. What plans are being hatched, what tragedies are being told? As Beautition said, go for the writing from a dark place approach, have the reader really sense this. You have already expressed that you are removed from the affairs of your "kin". Now elaborate on the schemes you will lay out with this second character..............I don't know just suggestions(??)

Either way, very nice. Post the end product.

nervous_twitch

I enjoyed that.. just as a general wonderment, would you employ the word 'kin' in real life?

Also, it sounded lyrical to me; a nice song instead perhaps.