Spinocerebral Ataxia Type 2

[Billy]

Spinocerebral Ataxia Type 2

I thought about death again today.
Being a hospice nurse you’d think
I would have built a wall, detached
myself. There are holes in my wall.
Recently, I failed when my patient
was forty-two with a hereditary
disease. His mother died from it.
Five out of seven of his siblings
didn't survive. He went for DNA
testing because he and his wife
didn't want to bring a child into
the world with the family affliction.
He found out it was his fate, but
it was too late. She was pregnant.
I met the boy, thirteen now,
only really known his father as
an invalid he feeds, changes his
dirty diapers to help his mom.
For the first few years of his life
the father had cared for him
while his mother worked. Dom
doesn't remember that, only
the spastic involuntary movements,
bedridden, unable to swallow or
speak. His grandma, who he didn't
know, made it to fifty-two, the
longest in the family. His father
can't eat or drink, hollow cheeks
and temples. It's time to think
about the end. I'm sure the end
has been following him since he
was his son's age. I can only try
to make it easier, to hide my grief
for the boy, smile at him without
revealing any pity, and wonder what
life is like stalked by death from
the start, a teenager aware of what's
to come. Like all of us, he can't be
sure of the date. Like me, he'll build
a wall. It'll have holes, a place where
he'll eventually come to praise death.

[CalebMurdock]

The language of the poem is very prosaic. Given the very uniform line lengths, I imagine you wrote it out on a computer screen in a proportional font, and then divided it into lines that look about the same length. That's not a bad thing to do -- I sometimes do it. In fact, as I get older I find myself trying to avoid a ragged look in my poems. However, if you go too far in that direction, then your line breaks tend not to align naturally with the ends of phrases.

Perhaps you could simply write the story out as a prose poem. (Having said that, I should say that I hate prose poems.) Better yet, look over the lines and simply adjust the line breaks to coincide more logically with meaning and phrases.

The poem is also verbose. Indeed, I've written poems that are more concise than this which you cut lines out of. I'm not going to do that though, as I don't want to tell you which lines should matter to you.

It's a poignant story. The ending is good.

[Billy]

You've presumed a lot of things.

[CalebMurdock]

So tell me what I presumed. That you typed it out in a proportional font and then divided it into even lines? Yes, that was a presumption. Poets will end up with even lines in other ways too. What I meant to say is that that is how it looks to me.

But the poem does sound very prosaic. Putting it into a paragraph would seem to be its natural form.

[Billy]

It’s a narrative poem. Most of your poems are narrative poems, maybe shorter than mine but I’m sure you’ve poems by more accomplished poets than me that are narrative and as long or longer than mine. In my humble opinion everything in the poem is salient to the whole.

[CalebMurdock]

To the best of my knowledge, narrative poems are judged by the same standards as other poems.

I didn't say anything about the length of it, beyond my impression that it is not concise.

I gave you what I felt was an honest critique. Sorry that you didn't find it useful.