Now ... this is really tough stuff: poetry. Will you help me to understand?

I

imported_Amber

New member
the smoke in my bedroom which is always burning
worsens you, motorcycle Icarus;
you are black and leathery and lean and
you cannot distinguish between sex and nicotine


anytime; it's all one thing for you -
cigarette, phallus, sacrifical fire -
all part of the grimy flight
on wings axlegreased from Toronto to Buffalo
for the secret beer over the border -

now I long to see you full blown and blak
over Niagara, your byke burning and in full flame
and twisting and pivoting over Niagara
and falling finally into Niagara,
and tourists coming to see your black leather wings
hiss and swirl in the steaming current -

now I long to give up cigarettes
and change the sheets on my carboniferous bed;
O baby, what Hell to be Greek in this country -
without wings but burning anyway.


Ok, this is the poem. thank you for your help
If you don't help I could commit suicide ...
I knew I could trust you ...
 
Don't kill yourself, well, not over a poem anyway.
It is a study of a relationship gone awry, some handsome hunk of a leather clad and pig ignorant biker who has picked up a good woman who now hates him. He has got her addicted to ciggies, they live in filth and have no friends other than other ignorant bikers.
She visualises him flying over Niagara on his bike and falling on the falls where all would see him and marvel. Hence the reference to Icarus who flew too close to the sun and melted the wax on his wings.
It seems as if this biker is seen as something mythic like Icarus, some sort of leather clad existential god who will soon crash and burn, someone who embodies a Myth more than others can.
 
I'm sure that you're familiar with the legend of Icarus (and his father Daedalus). The legend brings home to us the fact that here we are talking about a Greek immigrant. This young man is as careless of his life as Icarus was, being daring and ambitious with his motor cycle, on which he makes trips over the border to Canada to have a beer (the drinking age in Canada is 19, whereas in the USA it is 21). His smoking habit blackens and pollutes everything and the various symbols intermingle: the blackened sheets, the long thin shape of the cigarette and of the man in his black leather jacket, the phallus (the cigarette is taken perhaps to be a symbol of machismo, but it could be a sacrificial fire symbolising the man's potential death).

Don't commit suicide: that's what this young man might end up doing inadvertently with his reckless ways, falling into the Niagara Falls, aflame rather as one imagines Icarus, flying close to the sun (this is poetic licence, as in fact Icarus's wax wings melted).

The question I ask is: who is the man? Is it the writer in a wiser moment, struggling with his inner self? Or is it another person deploring the wildness of this smoking motorcyclist?
 
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