Young Writers Society

The hundreds of talks
we've had
run through my mind
once again
as sleep evades me.

I can't help embracing
the fear
that wraps itself
around me,
as I think of you.

I think about
what you say
about suicide,
finally escaping,
dying.

It scares me,
the things you do
drugs, smoking, drinking.
When you know
they could kill you.

I never know
where you are,
who you're with,
if your dead
or alive.

You know
what it's doing to you,
but you can't deal
with the pain
I face, every day.

You'd rather suffer
physically
rather than mentally,
for the rest
of your life.

I hate watching you
slowly
blow out the candle
of your existence.

What is going to happen
to me
when you die?
I don't just disappear,
I suffer to.

Do you really care though?
You think
my worries are sweet,
good thoughts to have,
but you are wrong.

These worries are eating me
alive,
from the inside out.
Unraveling my sanity
without a care.

You see the dark rings
that occupy my eyes,
like a new dark makeup
I just can't
get rid of.

I live like this,
like a zombie,
for you
because I love you,
and you return it with suicide?

You don't consider
that it hurts
people like me,
who have sacrificed so much
for you.

But if you really
have to go,
please don't forget me,
I really did love you
I always will.

Your best friend.
Love you always. <3



Ok, well tear it to shreads my friends.

I REALLY like this. It was touching and true and I felt like it was too good to be written by a 16 year old. My ONLY nitpick is that you make every two lines be one in my opinion i think it would sound A LOT better. lots of love Jenn aka hockey fan87

I think that this is a good poem. I would also think that you should make the lines longer because it would make it less choppy.I think alot of what you said in this poem is true.

scares me,
the things you do
drugs, smoking, drinking.
When you know
they could kill you.

I never know
where you are,
who you're with,
if your dead
or alive.

You know
what it's doing to you,
but you can't deal
with the pain
I face, every day.

You'd rather suffer
physically
rather than mentally,
for the rest
of your life.

I hate watching you
slowly
blow out the candle
of your existence.

What is going to happen
to me
when you die?
I don't just disappear,
I suffer to.

Hopefully nothing like you described in this poem is actually happening to you. Your descriptions good it makes me feel like this poem was born out of personal experience. Suicide poems can often be cliche but, you pulled it off really well. Keep writing, Fiction.

Heya Flower

I'm not going to give you a line by line critique in this review because I don't really think you need it. I'm also quite short for time so I want to make sure I can give you your review before I go on holiday later. So I'm not going to give you any nit-picks. Instead, I'm just going to go straight into my overall opinion on this.

Compared to your original version, I am confident in saying that I prefer this version. The main reason I prefer this version is because I could actually feel the emotions in it a lot better. In the original version, it was emotional, but it didn't really feel as personal as it could have. The way you've worded things and the way you've described things has made this version of the poem feel more personal than it previously did. I also noticed that you've used some really nice imagery. You've used some nice metaphors, emotive language, and lots of other little tricks to create the right mood to this poem. There was one metaphor that I especially liked.

I hate watching you
slowly
blow out the candle
of your existence.

I'm not sure why exactly, but I really liked this metaphor. Unless I've forgotten, I don't think you had this part in the original version, did you? I'm certainly glad that you have it in this version. It's probably one of my favourite stanza's from the poem. Another thing that I think helped you create an effective mood to this poem and give it some real emotion was your use of rhetorical questions. You don't find many poets using rhetorical questions in poems that could do with the help of rhetorical questions. It's surprising how effective they can be if used well.

I don't really have anything to critique, to be honest. The only small, rather unimportant critique is that I was very fond of the ending of your original poem. You ended it with a simple I love you if I remember correctly. Unlike the original version, you haven't ended this version like that. I'm not saying that your ending is bad now, not at all. I still do really like your ending in this version. There was just something about the ending of the original version that I very much liked. Many people might disagree with me about the ending; it's a personal opinion thing really. I just thought that I'd let you know that I actually preferred your old ending. Don't get me wrong though, this ending fits really nicely as well. It's up to you what you do, really.

Keep writing,

xoxo Skins

I liked this. It has a real deep feeling to it. It makes the reader think about his or her relationships with family or friends. Very good. Four stars. Keep writing.

Jennifer

Hello hello! Here as requested! You said to just dig in, and I have! Hope I've been at least a bit helpful!

Ok! First, I've read both versions, to get a better idea of what you started with, and I have some questions for you to answer before you read the rest of this, ok? Why are you writing this poem - to get what point across? I have your theme (suicide), and you appear to be dealing with suicide from the perspective of inside the issue, but not the person experiencing suicide themselves, if that makes sense. Your narrator is inside, but not the central heart of the matter, yes? Are you trying to evoke empathy to a specific side, here? Or go for a general helplessness/confusion/etc?

If yes to the above! Here's the quick and dirty - I think you express anger and hurt for your narrator, but I don't think you evoke anything like empathy, which I think is what you wanted. If not, then take anything said below with an extra grain of salt!

You have a good foundation of emotion to build on, but I think you've told the reader what you want them to feel (in both versions) rather than showed them - and there I think is where you can make some huge strides with this poem, and really write it to more of its potential.

Now! You have some really good elements, and I think if you expand using both the ideas and format, you'll be able to really take off, here.

Starting with the first stanza in the original poem,
"You can't leave me,"
the words slipped fervently
from my lips
for what seemed like
the thousandth time.

What you really have going for you here is your opening line - you establish immediately what you'll be talking about, and in what perspective and tension - second person, narrator to someone/suicide (if you'll allow me to personify suicide as a tangible being), which is reinforced by the rest of the stanza. This is an example of doing more showing than telling in poetry, I think- you hook us in, and set up a pattern of thought and action between two characters. Good! Now, you don't have to keep repeating yourself in this idea, just allude to it when and if needed. Thus! If you take the first stanza of your revised version, and assume you lead with your original,

The hundreds of talks
we've had
run through my mind
once again
as sleep evades me.

you wouldn't have to repeat "hundreds," necessarily, but you easily could say something more like, "Sleep evades me," and then continue your thoughts from there, knowing your reader already knows the issue at hand. This gives you space to take another action, say (and forgive my morbidity) the narrator's friend started discussing methods of suicide or you want to introduce another character or something - and follow "sleep evades me" with something like "the noose of [whatever]/hanging limp around your neck." Does that make sense? In this, you express fear far more exactly by giving that fear an outline than you do by simply claiming fear. Or, if you want to follow the image you already have of fear wrapping itself around the narrator, you could change an image and give the action to the narrator - "the weight of your [whatever]/hangs limp around my neck", suggesting suicide again, and the idea of strangulation and fear for not only the friend but the narrator as well. Or! Since you say in the original,

I could once again feel
the crippling fear
of losing someone
I love, to suicide.

you could change this still further and say "the noose of those who came before," though my example's a little melodramatic, I think. Or go for more grotesque and put the image of the other loved one acting as the noose of fear for either the narrator or the friend.

I hope the above makes sense, and is helpful! And you can easily take other elements you've already written about in both versions of this poem and rework them to suit your needs in this poem - take the reference to drugs, for instance. You can literally have the narrator describe finding the drugs and the subsequent reaction, or erratic behavior of the friend due to said drugs. Then, depending on your metaphors, you could continue one you've already started, like the noose example, and add to the end of the incident, "tightening it's grip on me/you/your life/etc."

Overall, I think you have some really strong elements to work with, and you just have to push yourself and your writing further to achieve (ok, in my biased opinion) better results, and strengthening what you already have. If you don't mind me closing on one last point, using your original draft -

"You can't leave me,"
the words slipped fervently
from my lips
for what seemed like
the thousandth time.

Memories flooded my mind
like an open faucet
as I again heard the words,
"I want to die."

Take these two already strong stanzas, and make them stronger by cutting the "fat" of them, so to speak. All I've done is cut out what strike me as unnecessary words, to make your language more concise and elegant. Granted, I am very much a minimalist, and I don't like *anything* that could possibly be considered extraneous, even when extraneous to me and extraneous to anyone else are very different and differing ideas.

Thank you for an engaging pair of reads, and good luck in further revision! Feel free to ask me about anything I've said above, or to clarify anything - or throw rotten tomatoes at me.

Bek

Hey, WritingWords here with the super-fast review you requested!!

So, what I think: You really expressed your feelings here and connected with the reader. Well, in my case, you did. I can feel the tension in this poem. Never read anything like this. Realy deep poem.

Here: What is going to happento me
when you die?
I don't just disappear,
I suffer to. (to--> too)

I don't want to critique this too deeply because I know that poems like these are written out of feeling, not to e perfect. Post more things for me to review in my WRFF thread!!

I really like this! It's great in every way! The way it flows, the imagery, the similes, and most of all, the emotion that seems to genuinely be flowing from this wonderful piece of writing! My only nitpick it that the poem would be less choppy if you combined a few lines every now and then, because both some stanzas and lines seem unnaturally short. Keep on writing, you have a talent!

~Lindsay
"Conquest is easy. Control is not." -Kirk

Hey Flower! Sorry about being rather late in getting to this.

So I've also read both versions, and I have to say your beginning is better here. You show the situation instead of telling it, which makes this poem painfully relatable, a good thing. It's easier to understand being eaten alive by emotions now that you're showing what happens when a friend is debating killing themselves.

But I find your beginning in this version weaker. Before you had the bond of friendship to keep worry together. The last line was also much more powerful in the old version, with explaining how even if one friend is tearing themselves apart you're still beside them. Here, I'm not really feeling that. It could be because you've changed the style of the poem from showing what the situation is to telling again. If you could find a way to show the connectiveness, maybe how you were the person there every time they needed help, yet you can't save them, then the beginning would be strengthened.

I also find you're not being as clear with the death as you were in the last version. The first version sounded more like a progression from alive to a wish for love after death, while this version sounds like a final plea for life until the last line, then it sounds once again like a wish for a good afterlife.

I think the muddied-feeling at the end (last three stanzas) can be solved with a showing stanza where you're there for them and trying to talk them out of letting themselves go a final time. Then the last line can be "I love you" for the impact.

Past the content, I liked how you played with line-breaks in here to put emphasis on certain words. However, after awhile, the line-breaks got a bit repetitive. Because you were consistently using the second line with a single word, the emphasis gets lost.

Overall I found this started to drag in the middle and at the end. When you started interspersing longer explanations into the imagery, I got a bit less interested. And the end wish for death was a bit too quick a wrap-up. I did like the beginning though. It was hard to stop reading with the images presented.

Hope this helps! Again, sorry for being late. PM me if you have any questions.

~Rosey

I'm on the fence with this.
I hate the subject matter, because I feel it's a bit.. contrived when it's written about.
Maybe contrived is the wrong word.
However, you wrote it well without being repetitive.
Each stanza lends itself to a whole idea, and I like that.
Good job!

Flower~Child wrote:The hundreds of talks
we've had
run through my mind
once again
as sleep evades me.

I can't help embracing
the fear
that wraps itself
around me,
as I think of you.

I think about
what you say
about suicide,
finally escaping,
dying.

It scares me,
the things you do
drugs, smoking, drinking.
When you know
they could kill you.

I never know
where you are,
who you're with,
if your dead
or alive.

You know
what it's doing to you,
but you can't deal
with the pain
I face, every day.

You'd rather suffer
physically
rather than mentally,
for the rest
of your life.

I hate watching you
slowly
blow out the candle
of your existence.

What is going to happen
to me
when you die?
I don't just disappear,
I suffer to.

Do you really care though?
You think
my worries are sweet,
good thoughts to have,
but you are wrong.

These worries are eating me
alive,
from the inside out.
Unraveling my sanity
without a care.

You see the dark rings
that occupy my eyes,
like a new dark makeup
I just can't
get rid of.

I live like this,
like a zombie,
for you
because I love you,
and you return it with suicide?

You don't consider
that it hurts
people like me,
who have sacrificed so much
for you.

But if you really
have to go,
please don't forget me,
I really did love you
I always will.

Your best friend.
Love you always. <3



Ok, well tear it to shreads my friends.