All Comments on 'Comfortable Silence'

My favorite of anything I've read all week I think. Good work.

Lovely, especially this:

"What if

my eyes don't read gestures,

but stories told by bitten nails?"

Like the original phrasing...

You're on a roll MiniMoni.

Tess

Never buy, I remind myself again, any cover - or a title of a poem for that matter, before checking its content.

But I love being put to the task. I don’t think a comfortable silence is what this poem is all about. Maybe he wished that they had. But from his description of his partner’s talking it sounds like a post mortem to relations which died. You realize that: “thoughts / long since doomed/ flop around in futile/death rattle” are hardly an offer to move into a different style of communication, and: “What if I never listened / anyway to what you said” is not much of an advocacy for a righteous lover.

The silence at the moment may be comfortable or not, but the emotional state the now single narrator seems to be at, comes across as mostly defensiveness (See the basic structure of the poem as an argument). It could be that other feelings, maybe deeper, more painful are yet to surface and be experienced (he noticed her bitten nails, but never listened to her). But not at the moment this poem captures.

I love a poem which “leads you on”, not as a fault, but as part of its artistic design. You don’t read ABOUT the mental processes of the character. You discover them as they are being demonstrated by the short comings of the all too human character.

by any other name is still an alt!

*

Nothing new. He is just not Anon. My appreciation to your poem shoud not be un named (at least as Anon. goes). I hope this time I get it right.