Typeless

Some brilliant images and ideas here. I really like your metaphors: the image of tap dancing suggests a flurry of fingers flying, and your flexible use of words is a great asset to the poem (I don't think many people would think of words as twisting into leaves, and yet there's some great emotion there-- a suggestion that that's what people are trying to do as they write anyway, that maybe the emotion behind writing is a lot more important than the words that actually come out on the page.

If there's one part of the poem that, for some reason, took me out of this beautiful moment you're creating-- it was your closing image. It's a good instinct to try to close the poem by bringing it back around to the beginning, and that's a fine technique that many great writers use-- but for some reason subjectively it doesn't fit in this poem for me. It seems to shift the focus of the poem from emotion (which seems to be what you want to address in this piece) back to the tool, and somehow that's not quite satisfying for the reader. I like the idea of the tear on the typewriter-- I don't think you should lose that because it kind of grafts the raw emotion and the tool together. I just think that you can really close and put the bow on this one better with a line that moves the poem forward another step or two, instead of bringing it back around in a circle. In fact, reading it again, it might not even be the image of the typewriter that puts it just a little off balance-- it might be the image of the missing key, which could be more powerful if you only use it once? Hmm...

Write on! You're talented.

-Jeff (UVM mentor)

Wow Greenie... I can't stop reading your stuff...
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The crimson tears of slaughter flow eternally through the sands of time... ~Self Quoted