hi dev, i loved this and will be back for another read soon.

irene x

I really enjoyed this piece and believe I can relate.  Keep up the good work!

Just a question before I read.  I haven't posted any poetry on here yet but I keep noticing that everything is doubled spaced.  Is that a problem with cutting and pasting your stuff into this program?  Generally poetry is single-spaced.  Just curious.

I'm confused by "Doused - to be continued?"  Is that the end of the poem?  The poem itself is soft and much like the gentle rain you describe.  It flows down the page in a very soft and -- well, poetic -- manner.  If that's the last line I don't feel it works at all.  It is jarring and hard and inconclusive.  It's also puzzelling because it's a bit of an odd way to end a poem.  Poems should be a world, a snapshot, a frozen moment in time or emotion.  Inclusive in itself. It was great until I got to the end.

You are asking someone to douse you in their rain and you say you stand waiting with a flower, thirsty for the dew.  These are wonderful descriptions of lust and desire for someone.  Like the person that you lust for has the power, perhaps it's unrequited love?  Then the "is it wicked of me" line confuses me.  It's wicked of you to try to seduce her to love you?  One might say that it would perhaps be more wicked of her (sorry to assume "her") to toy with your emotions.

Just a thought.

Hey Dev,

I want to start off by saying that you have some really, really sweet images in this poem.  I think that my favorite is probably,

marinated olives sitting in an earthenware dish deep in its green oil

because it is very simple but still very easy to visualize.  I really like this sort of description because it grounds the reader in the poem and they can say "Yeah, I see exactly what the author is trying to say."   I think that there are a couple of places in this poem that you could hit harder with visual imagery & connect to the reader.

For example:

cascading with freedom spilling onto city streets.

what exactly does "cascading with freedom" mean?  What exactly do you want that to look like?  I can imagine water droplets sort of erratically falling over "you", sort of forming together in those random little rivulets like when you're small and watch rain gather on a car window -- but the point is that it doesn't really matter what image you invoke, just invoke something in the reader with a solid image.  "freedom" doesn't mean anything to me in any substantial way, but if you want to talk about why it's free & how it's free, that could be really sweet.  The hard part is doing that & still keeping your writing concise enough so that you're not diluting the actual theme.

Actually, that's sort of an interesting point -- you use water images a lot in this poem (naturally, since it's partially about the rain), but they're all sort of disconnected from each other.   You have the dousing & the cascading and then a little later you talk about 'pools of promise', 'seep into one another'.  Is there a way you could connect these images together & combine them with the poem's theme?

The theme is interesting, too -- it seems to have some sort of power exchange built in and the poem's voice is completely passive.  "Douse me", "should you edge closer" & etc etc.  I don't think that the author takes any action anywhere.  I'm not entirely sure what I'm saying about this except that I don't think it's as effective to let the poem be entirely passive.  Even if you're going to be inactive in the poem, you should still mention how you feel about the whole deal or some sort of reaction to it.

One last thing I'll talk about is flow, which is sort of a difficult, esoteric concept.  Actually, that's not true -- it's a very simple concept, "does this sound good?" that can intepreted in many different ways ("sure", "no").  There are a couple of places that I think you could work on flow.

The first thing is that I feel that words that end in the same manner sound awkward when placed next to one another:

am left standing holding your orchid plucked, tipped

"standing holding" and then "plucked, tipped" really break up the flow of the poem and interrupt the reading.  Commas are also difficult to place -- you may want to examine places like

that mist, that swallows.

and read them aloud.  There, for example, I don't think you need that extra comma.

I hope that you find some piece of this helpful.  Feel free to let me know if you'd like to to touch on something more extensively or if anything I wrote didn't make sense.

Truman

That's odd.

I think that my favorite is probably,

 

"marinated olives sitting in an earthenware dish deep in its green oil"

 

because it is very simple but still very easy to visualize. 

Because that was my least favorite. Precisely for the reason above (Not that I'm saying Truman is wrong.....Oh no......poetry, and imagery in poetry is entirely subjective.) But, for me, the imagery to that point is ethereal, abstract, evocative....this image is of earth and solidity. For me, this line jarred - it was uncomfortable within the context of the poem as a whole.

Which, by the way, is entirely lovely.

There is something of the erotic embedded in almost every syllable. Hardly a word is wasted. It transcends easy categorisation and invites the reader to work hard to interpret. The form is perfect. The rhythm and flow is almost spot on.......

If I'm being honest, in addition to the above example, a couple of the lines jarred slightly, and took me out of the dream :

 Strange things happen when I think of you

There must be a better way of saying this more in line with the voice you've established through the rest of the poem. For me, this is too literal. Can you abstract? This is a line of 'action' in a poem that seems to try and avoid action in a flurry of allegories about feelings, potential and imagery.

you satisfy when you deem timely

As above. It's just too harsh a transition. From the abstract straight into the physical.

While I, as a reader, have my own opinion on the meanings and interpretation of this poem, I won't insist on it here. Suffice to say, with a little editing, I think this is an absolute gem.

Ade.