Beauty and its Beast

And rather chilling.

I'm not quite sure about the hiccup line.

"swoosh-p, swoosh-p, swoosh-p." Hiccup sounds like stomach distress.

I think you both hit upon a deficiency with "face mask." I decided to take the line out completely. I still like a segue to llne 4, maybe a little onomatopoetic to mimic the sound of the ventilator. Thanks for the feedback:

Beauty and its Beast

So now it’s come to this:

some oxymoronic plastic tube,

hiccup, hiccup, hiccup,

leaves a desert upon your tongue

each time a valve opens up.

Meanwhile your Hollywood eyes

droop over an erstwhile hourglass neck

as if two pearl drop necklaces dropped

like a string of tears

to the sands of time.

with meaning, both meaningful and obscure at once. The tone of irritation mixed with the sense of inevitability (or maybe resignation) comes across strong. And then that second strophe just leaves me with sadness. A painful but honest poem,

I am not sure about the use of "recipe." I get the connection between two different kinds of masks but not everyone use a recipe to make a face mask. So, might be too obscure (or maybe it's me lol). You might play on some other comparison between the two masks, maybe something like "in a face mask that's not soothing." Just a thought. :-)

Thank you for your detailed comment, Cleardaynow. That always helps a writer look critically at his work. You may be on to something about the "mask" but I'm going to wait a bit to see if other comments occur before responding. I personally like the comments to serve as a chronology so that I can "workshop" the poem and hopefully make it better, even though I can't edit the original post.

I am always pleased when I see that Greenmountaineer has entered another poem.

Let me start by saying that I like the poem a lot.

He is the only current author in Non Erotic Verse where I can be interested in trying to unravel what presumably is deliberately not clear.

Let me burden people with my take. It seems evident (though I have been wrong before) that this is a poem about a once beautiful woman now ravaged by old age and ill health. This is an evocative image.

Oxymoronic (a great word play) means that there is some meaningful contradiction in terms (yes, I had to look it up). But contrast between her current suffering and what? Her past image?

I like enormously the sound and feel of ‘as if two pearl drop necklaces dropped like a string of tears to the sands of time’ – and the reference back to her ‘erstwhile hourglass neck’. However, I then struggle to see what the actual imagery is. The only ‘ropes of pearls’ could be the folds of skin on her neck & bags under the eyes. Or does the mask & tube form that shape?

I could make no sense of ‘mask that's not a recipe leaves a desert upon your tongue’. Perhaps recipe is a play on dessert for desert but either way it makes little sense to me.

My own preference is for clarity as exemplified by Philip Larkin – though I adore TS Eliot who is not the most accessible of writers. Nonetheless, I am a succour for simplicity and clarity.