Four Men

there are four men inside of me
and they are always at war.
the boys drink their whisky and
plug big round red holes of hate
in each oth­er. when they get
low on ammo they patch each oth­er
up, pass around the bot­tle and
take pot­shots at passer­by.
after awhile they make enough
to go buy some more ammo and
whisky. when they leave I run
out and pick up the shells.
if I hold one up to my ear
some­times I hear me whis­per­ing.

Work­shop if ye be men of val­or, for the entrance to this cave is guard­ed by a crea­ture so foul, so cru­el that no man yet has fought with it and lived! Bones of full fifty men lie strewn about its lair. So, brave knights, if you do doubt your courage or your strength, come no fur­ther, for death awaits you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth.

6 thoughts on “Four Men”

  1. As request­ed by Mr. Adam “would also help if you left this info as com­ments” Har­vey, I post this email dis­cus­sion of said poem:

    L: i think you should blog about some­thing inter­est­ing and deep today.

    AH: done and done

    L: damn.
    you’d make a good wife.

    AH: no real­ly, i’m already done

    L: i know.
    dork.
    i like the last two lines.
    deep.
    and inter­est­ing.

    AH: is the mis­spelling too much?

    L: it may throw a per­son a bit.
    i was won­der­ing about that myself…

    AH: i want it to sound child­like though…

    L: real quick–i won­der if you’re gonna mis­spell “four” in the first line whether you may wan­na mis­spell it in the title as well?
    and actu­al­ly, i did­n’t get that. i thought you were going for red­necky. heh heh. though that just may be that i did­n’t read it close enough. although. if you were going for child­like, i won­der, would a child have such depth of reflec­tion and under­stand­ing of the peo­ple war­ring inside of them… also, would they have knowl­edge about whiskey-drink­ing and stuff (i think that’s what leaned me in the direc­tion of red­necky).

    AH: i changed the title before you sent this. hehe.
    and okay. will think on the gim­mick a lit­tle more.

    L: also, might you want to mis­spell some­thing in the last two lines as well? just won­der­ing b/c they kin­da set them­selves aside by the pre­cise­ness and crisp­ness of the lan­guage which is a bit dif­fer­ent then the rest of the poem. i do like them lines though.

    AH: per­haps i should f— up the gram­mar instead of just mis­spelling then. cuz the last line has fucked up gram­mar

    L: wow. my gram­mar clear­ly sucks. what’s f‑ed up about it?

    AH: “me whis­per­ing” “myself whis­per­ing”

    L: oh. heh heh.
    eh. gram­mar shmam­mer.

    (*weep­ing qui­et­ly to myself for my gram­mar suck­age*)

  2. i got the red­neck vibe as well, but felt that it still worked that way.
    i might alter the begin­ning to:
    “the for men inside me are always at war”

  3. I’ve revised this to be a bit tighter, and spelt every­thing cor­rect-like this time. the short sen­tences at the end are still a bit too chop­py i think. the front flows more.

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