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Eros's avatar

Brilliant. The entire poem is brilliant. In your evocation of Dorian Gray alone, I found five different angles. This poem is as astounding from a technical lens as it is from a thematic one.

Deeply impressed,

Eros

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Josh Datko's avatar

Thank you for that. I quite liked how it came out myself. I was working for quite a while on another poem, that just didn't flow and felt very forced.

I read it to my wife who said "if it's a work in progress than I'm sure it will be good." Which her nice way of saying, it was worse then our child's poems. 🤣

But there was this one line I had in there with this idea of the picture. So I threw away that other poem and this was born.

This has happened to me before as well. There's a natural resistance to certain ideas or topics and some others just leap out.

In any case, I'm glad it did and I'm happy you enjoyed it.

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Stefan Baciu's avatar

came to say what Eros said above. Love how you evidenced that history isn’t frozen in glory, but it transforms and corrodes. And maybe even ends up condemning itself.

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Allison Taylor Conway's avatar

Thank you for this. Your poem is so well crafted and so very powerful.

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Josh Datko's avatar

Thanks Allison. Appreciate the read and comment. As you say, it’s nice to have you in my corner :)

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Allison Taylor Conway's avatar

You know that’s right. :)

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Ray Diess's avatar

Last stanza is a brilliant way to flip an iconic image. I’ve also been finding that iconic American imagery is starting to curdle and take on different meanings. This poem gave those feelings words, which is one of the best things art can do.

Thanks for writing this.

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Josh Datko's avatar

Thank you Ray, very kind of you of you there. Yeah, there is some fertile ground here for inspiration for sure. Sadly.

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Daniel V. Gaglio's avatar

It's such an iconic image I could easily picture it in my mind while reading. Then I watched as it transformed with your words

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Josh Datko's avatar

Yeah, this programming of this picture is strong :) Objectively, as far as photos go, it's pretty good though.

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