Can You Feel? Comments

CAN YOU FEEL? Three simple words make a simple question - Hardly. Rather they open the floodgates to a torrent of feelings. Too many to process. Too many to address. Too many to even remember by the of the poem. I can imagine someone using this poem in a Dramatic Reading. Highlighting passages for her or his recital. Carefully choosing the speed of delivery for various stanzas, and then tossing all the planning out and deciding to do it spontaneously. Whatever the final decisions the speaker makes the performance will crackle with energy. And it's that energy of your writing which makes this more than what it appears on first reading. I identified the closing lines on my first encounter as stunning, a reversal, a VOLTA. But now I have found another passage that rises out of the flood of the poem, namely, I DON'T HAT YOU/I DON'T LIKE YOU/I LOVE YOU.

I could barely finish reading this poem because the emotions you express are so raw and passionate. But I pushed through to the end and was rewarded by the luminous, yes LUMINOUS closing lines, which to my mind, redeem all the preceding pain - Can you feel my love that will never die? /Even at our final goodbye? /I HATE... US./BUT I LOVE YOU. I cannot put into words how profoundly moving I find these closing words. You have expressed something very painful but also very wonderful. It's not an end, but a beginning....