This doesn't work and I've been trying to figure why. I think the form conflicts with the poem's intent. It wants to portray hard-headedness to return to the narrators kiss, return from his death... The end rhymes of spree/he and walk/talk and bliss/kiss occur outside the stanza giving a sense of connectivity contrary to the form of tercet,tercet, something other and ending in tercet. This may mirror the helter-skelter of alcoholism, but the last line implies a kind of coherence outside the form, almost redemptive. Form can echo a poem and sometimes be discordant.

 

Having been raised by alcoholics and experienced the "geographical cure" I have a stubborn affinity to poems like this.

 

I don't think any of this helps.

 

larry

the dead last alcoholic
wanted new life,
woke up on the opposite bank

 

and checked his name tag.
i met him walking and stopped to talk
and he said...well, suppose he told me this

 
'though my lives have been little bliss
i have known the raptures of many'.

didn't i just use that word - empathy?

i'm sure i did - somewhere.

 

the context is a little off here, crow.

 

maybe a little reorganization of the poem; maybe start off with:

________________________________________________

 

 

 

 

or something like that.

susan

whoops. wrong spacing and one added pronoun at end.

 

there's supposed to be a line spacing following:

 

 

so as to keep the form.

 

s.