Charlie Foxtrot
The muskets and grass travel among the graves
That are as will-stained as the sacrament with wine. The bodies, clasped,
bone-dragged as anchors. Those molds were casted into trenched caves
there were too many scaffolds treaded upon, perhaps,
the truth-be-tolds. I thought to study the living grasping
of things. Even the low growls of hesitation misbehave
and hesitate (what if it’s alive?—this unruly cadaver gasps
too parched or blank to render memories, enslaved).
The cacolet swaths to scathe
across the slopes, tipped as a velvet wave,
each perfect blade wrinkled of dead weight.
The absolute is blood to dust. No limb, no ache,
no mercy from the others with un-calibrated-blues,
or breeched and muzzled cannons to abuse.
Alright, so I have really tried to make sense if this but I do not know where to go with it. Many of the lines are weird and incoherent but I thought that I would ask you guys before I completely dissected it for the parts that I deem as interesting. Any ideas, suggestions?
My first question would be: why “Charlie Foxtrot,” or “CF”? What is that meant to read as? I’m just not getting how those particular letters would function with the rest of the piece. And it seems you’re playing with the sonnet form, yeah? I only say that because of the line length and the rhyme scheme…I would say that, more often than not, something this formal will also carry with it either some sort of meter or, at the very least, a prescribed syllable count. Not that you necessarily have to go that route, but, speaking from personal experience, sonnets just seem wrong when they’re less than boxy…All that said, I think the main thing this draft suffers from is nothing concrete enough to anchor the thing. There’s plenty of imagery, yes, and I think we start somewhere in a military graveyard, but that’s kind of all I can say with much certainty. The real confusion starts in ln 4, what are these “scaffolds” that sit/sat…over the graves, or something? Maybe consider being just a bit more specific with some of the images. For instance, why “molds […] casted into trenched caves,” as opposed to something like “we threw them into the ground,” and if you’re after an image that extrapolates on the graves themselves, I can’t imagine “trenched caves” is doing much work for you, anyway. It’s just too too clinical, too separate from the reality, if we can pretend to accurately utilize such a term, of the action.
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