Waiting

[drummondo]

She woke me up early one day.

Without pausing for greetings or breakfast,

We left.

 

"I'm taking you for a walk,"

She said.

She always chose the most

Interesting paths, so I followed.

As we stepped through the door,

We entered her world.

 

A long queue, it seemed,

Made up mainly of men.

They looked bored,

As if their wait had been long

And fruitless.

We made our way down the line,

To what appeared to be the back.

Many of the guys avoided our glances,

Like they'd rather not be there.

 

As we advanced and approached

The back of the queue,

More and more of the guys

Fought to catch her eye.

The man at the end of the queue

Went so far as to exclaim;

"I thought you'd never come back!"

But she ignored him,

And whispered to me a story

Of wishers and stalkers.

I nodded knowingly,

But I didn't understand.

 

She stopped at the end and told me to wait;

"I'll be back in a minute,

I just need to say hello to someone."

 

I waited.

I couldn't say how long I'd waited,

But eventually she reappeared,

Walking the line

In the arms of another man.

 

I fought to catch her eye,

and as she approached

I called to her;

"I thought you'd never come back!"

She turned to her man

And muttered a story of drunks and deceit;

"I've never seen him before in my life...

Wait here for a minute, will you?"

[reverie]

hey drum that's deep...

 

I don't quite get it all, but that's okay...

 

kind of a mixture of unrequited love, admiring from a far, and the one's that have tried before...

 

you should have slammed this...

 

rev...

[Tralla]

this absolutely rocks. I love the tone to it, and the way it flows. The repetition isn't slap-you-in-the-face standing out, it's a part of the poem, and fits there. It makes you smile.

 

thanks for giving me my smile of the day.

[Wyvern]

Nice narrative poem, drummondo. I really liked the phrasing of the girl's stories, and found the notion of "wishers and stalkers" very intriguing. I also liked the direct tone of the narrative, and thought that the curt wording of the sentences drove across the narrator's sadness well.

 

The ending of this poem didn't bring it to a sense of closure for me, and you may want to detail the narrator's reactions more or detail the girl's next actions to tie it all together. Just my thoughts.

 

Nicely done, overall.

[Loki Wyrd]

Whereas I felt the ending worked well. Finishing it as you did gave me a sense of being left there at the end of the line, confused and distraught, wondering how long a person would stand there waiting.

[Quincunx]

This one is a zinger. We take pride in our collections but don't tend to ask our collectibles for permission.

 

There's only one point I would change:

 

We made our way down the line,

To what appeared to be the back.

 

A few lines later, you did the same thing with slightly better phrasing. The second line can definitely be removed, perhaps the first one as well.

 

I don't fully understand why "mainly" isn't italicized. All it does is make me think the collectibles were sexual conquests--was that your intended effect?--and to this collector's mind, the poem works just fine without that implication.