This is a strong, quietly devastating poem. I’ll walk through what’s working very well, then point out a few places where you might consider revision—only if they serve your intent.
What’s working:
1. Call-and-response structure
The alternating “i say / you say” creates an emotional rhythm that mirrors the relationship itself: unequal, asynchronous, never quite meeting. The repetition reinforces the imbalance without you ever having to explain it.
Notably:
“we'll talk later / maybe / baby”
“call me / baby / maybe”
The mirroring here is excellent—it shows how language gets recycled, drained of meaning.
2. Repetition as emotional pressure:
Lines like:
feeling too much,
feeling too much.
and
I hate it here.
I hate it here.
work because they don’t escalate—they stall. That stalling is the point. It feels like being stuck in a loop of texts you already know won’t lead anywhere.
The repetition never feels ornamental; it feels compulsive.
3. Casual language that carries weight
Phrases like:
“what’s new with you?”
“found someone yet?”
“we're still screwing. / right?”
are devastating precisely because they’re ordinary. The bluntness of “we're still screwing” cuts through the softer longing elsewhere. It’s emotionally asymmetrical in a way that feels painfully real.
4. The ending lands cleanly
The final stanza:
i say
gotta go,
I’ll call you
call you later,
baby,
maybe.
is especially strong because it collapses agency. “I’ll call you” is immediately undercut by repetition and then by “maybe.” It’s resignation disguised as politeness.
Ending on “maybe” is the right choice—it echoes everything before it.
Possible Areas to Consider (Optional)
These are not fixes—just questions worth asking.
1. Opening image: “messages clog my phone”
This is effective, but familiar. It works because of what follows, but you could consider whether a more tactile or surprising verb might sharpen it further (e.g., stack, buzz, rot, pile). That said, “clog” does suggest suffocation, which aligns with the poem’s emotional arc.
If familiarity is intentional, it’s doing its job.
2. The cigarette break line
come find me on your cigarette break
This is a great detail—specific, intimate, transient. You might consider leaning into it slightly more, since it’s one of the few concrete images in the poem. Even a single adjective could deepen its texture. But restraint is also part of the poem’s power, so this is a delicate balance.
3. Capitalization choice
The consistent lowercase “i” reinforces vulnerability and diminishment. It works. Just be sure it’s a conscious stylistic choice rather than habit—because here, it supports the emotional hierarchy between speakers.
Overall Impression:
This poem excels at emotional realism, restraint, using repetition without redundancy, and letting a subtext do the heavy lifting. It feels like a late-night reread of old messages you shouldn’t still have. There’s no melodrama, no moralizing—just the slow erosion of hope through language that never quite commits.
These patrons of 2025 Iceland Airwaves were illuminated by reflected stage light, just about as dark and lacking in color to the eye as the image on the left. With some post-processing I could recover the contrast and the color while casting sort of a fairy-world pastel quality over the proceedings.
*Handheld at 1/20th of a second, ISO 1600, f0.95.
EV0 is 1 second @f1 @ISO100
ISO 1600 is 4 stops faster so the exposure time was 1/20 of a second = EV 0. This image is about 2 stops under-exposed so the E.V. was actually about -2.
A neighborhood grocery of my youth was the notorious “Galeno’s”
Little more than a shack, it was a purveyor of pop and candy, with a few boxes of cereal and soap, toilet paper and not much else lining the shelves. When I was quite young I would make the two-block trek there to buy baseball cards, cards that would be worth big money now. They were probably the only things of worth that were ever sold there, albeit taking years to appreciate.
When we were teens, the standing joke was that Galeno's sold stale pop. We always wondered how he managed to stay in business for forty years. The above picture was taken in the mid 1980s, not long before it was finally condemned. Perhaps he sold numbers? He was always talking on the phone in the back room. For several years, behind the store, there was a trailer that his beautiful daughter lived in.
Your spine rests in a smooth arch, penetrating the darkness with its soft outline. I could trace its contours with the wet edge of my tongue, turning your combination with my passion, and typing your password with the tips of my exploring fingers. I could see your lips in the dark, the rough texture of them spiking the night with their glistening punctuality.
Every word you say will be forever lost in the satin darkness like a thousand dandelion seeds blowing into the wind, never to be found again. Children pick out their forms as they rest among lawn-mown grass and budding golden dandelions ready to be plucked and given to mother. We will let our bodies lie, entangled in their sweat and fervor, writing poetry in the moon light, waiting to be picked like flowers or weeds.
And this is the alpha and the omega, the first and last of all sensations.
I’ve been psyching myself up for my 11th* trip to Iceland with pics from the the last one. Studio 101 is evidently popular with the younger set, populated by teens primping for the runtúr?
In this case, what “you don’t know what I got” is the camera I shot this dragster with. Sold as a “Retro Digital Camera” for the grand sum of $33.50 (it’s a little more expensive now) it’s a fine example of just how far and how cheap digital imaging has become. While it isn’t quite capable of fine imaging and the numbers on the lens are a complete fantasy, it does the job. YMMV.
