Saturday 7 August 2010

Portrait of the Girl

PORTRAIT OF THE GIRL
She is in love with her dream,
a dream that has substance
in flesh, blood, bloody flesh
Strong man, rich man, powerful man
Her love is real it is a dream
He is there, knows it, sends her
thousand dollar checks but he
does not send himself
His time can not be spared
from champagne balls,
from the filmstar goddesses

She rejects all other love
for undemanding dreams
that find kisses elsewhere
Her child uncle love
does not need physical gifts
Sex enough from wife number four
He takes only the toiling of her soul
over which he alone has power
Her unhealthy body is her own to give
as bait for others to boost an ego
totally separate from her dream

And when the substance of the dream
dies she will doubtless cry
But the tears won't wash the dream away
The grief will pass when the will's been read
And when her soul is at last set free
will it fly to new aesthetic heights
or fall into remnants of brick and mortar
and the filthy lucre that accrues ?
And will she take another love,
retreat into a comfortable, reliable post,
or live at last and dream no more ?
© GERALD ENGLAND

Composed: Pontefract, 20th January 1973

Publication

1992 The People's Poetry

3 comments:

  1. This flows nicely. I noticed that sometimes you leave the punctuation and then pick up again later. Nevertheless, the text is so clear that there is no doubt as to the meaning. Funny thing about English. When it's written best, it needs no punctuation.

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  2. I went through a phase of using minimum punctuation and this stems from that period.

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  3. Good exercise. David Brinkley talked about developing such a method when he was a young news writer. He said you could always count on an anchor to mess up what you had written. So, he developed a style that they couldn't mess up. The punctuation had to come from the words, syntax, etc.

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