Young Writers Society

I

at night, your fingers flexed towards the sky
to unhook the stars, to catch them in your jaws
and run your tongue over the jagged pieces, but they held fast
so you mouthed your wrist instead, capillaries breaking
beneath your touch, the bruises murmuring, you’re still alive.
love is simple like that, in darkness.

II

you plunged into the bathtub
and cooked in the broth of your own blood,
carving love letters across your arms,
the red fingerprints on the white tiles
a confession, an interrupted goodbye.
i told you veins could break.

III

you’re downtown, sitting on the curb by the hospital—
a fever of sirens, the thrum of red and blue lights,
plastic bags shuddering around you like stolen breaths—
licking the blood from your wrists,
pulling on the stitches with your teeth
as you dig for the last tender place.

Greetings I'm LastPaladin and my first quick look of this piece shows it's a suicide poem, I'm not very fond of them, but unlike many others this doesn't come across as too whiny just extremely morose and depressing, the word choice is exellent and really adds to the horror, and the metaphors and similes are just plain beautiful, in a weird way reminds of Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen, just as raw and horrifying, which is a good thing you made a selfish act sound superb in a poem, it's rare for me to such piece written this well.

Now what I don't like is small, but essentially it's the ending, I just feel it's weak and pointless, you stick with the ending of second last stanza unless you add more to it and really capture a terrific ending, otherwise from that small nit pick I see a great piece that deserves a like.

Overall, great work and really impressed with how ya captured a far too overused topic and gave it some beauty and even some originality with metaphors chosen.

Hope this helps.

Isha here to review!

First off, I would like to say that this was an excellent piece! Like Pall said, suicide poems usually aren't very good, as the idea is so overused. But you are one of the few people who seem to be able to take overused, normally cliché pieces and turn them fresh.

I was completely soaked into the poem, and it gave me a few shivers. The first line had me hooked, which is a very, very good thing. Obviously. The first stanza was by far my favourite. The imagery in it was absolutely amazing, provoking and over-all just dark. Loved it.

The second stanza was excellent, as well. More strong, new imagery. Just one thing I want to point out:
[quote="blackbird12]i told you veins could break, your wrists said. [/quote]
Nothing major at all, just that the 'i' isn't capitalized.

The last stanza was good, but the very end was just a bit dry compared to the rest of the poem. Not that it was bad at all, mind you, I was just expecting a little bit more.

Anyways, the poem was incredible and I am very, very impressed! Keep up the excellent work!

-Isha

I won't go into much detail, because everyone ahead of me pretty much said everything.
The ending just seemed like it was stapled onto the rest of the poem. Over all, good, gruesome job.

I will review to say that in my opinion, contrary to the above reviewers, the ending was very interesting! I loved the sense of continuity in that last stanza. It's kind of a "the fight will never end" feeling, as if "Yeah, okay, so the doc sewed up the cut--but that won't stop me." Very, very powerful.

I do agree with the other things people have presented, however--your imagery was very evocative and definitely added to the sense of a fight going on between life and the want to inflict pain (the wrists and the need to "find the last tender place", respectively). The style you used in starting lines, too, was interesting (using no capital letters); it puts more emphasis on the imagery, I think.

I don't know if I can find anything else to say. So I'll leave it at that with an encouragement to continue writing poetry (I can't really do it to save my life, so kudos to you! ) and a *like*!
~Glad

Hi there, Blackbird.

I'm here to fulfill your request to my best.

Though I'm not a big fan, I will agree that you've given a little fresh breath into a suicide poem, which I’ll commend you for.

There are some things however that irks me slightly.

at night, your fingers flexed towards the sky
to unhook the stars, to catch them in your jaws
and run your tongue over the jagged pieces, but they held fast
so you mouthed your wrist instead, capillaries breaking
beneath your touch, the bruises murmuring, you’re still alive.
love is simple like that, in darkness.

The biggest thing in number one is how weak the ending is here.
You've made an effort to pump some life into a long dead topic, but at the end, it's almost like you gave up and took a cliché, simple sentence and threw it in at the end.
Not only is it thrown in, it doesn't flow at all. It's kind of forcing the reader to push through your word.

Now the imagery in this is well done, but the transition:

but they held fast
so you mouthed your wrist instead,

Here is again, weak. You go from stars in your mouth to your wrists. It's not an easy jump for your reader. Because when you're talking about stars, space then BAM wrists, body part. You didn't flow in your connection of the two. It's a really easy connection to make honestly, you just take your original idea/theme and continue it until it clears out to leave room for another; think of them as waves, coming to shore, and pulling back until another surge of water rolls over it to take up higher.

I'm not going to individually dissect the other two for you, because the same problems resonates in the other ones.
The problems I believe you should address are:

1. You fall back to clichés when you can't really seem to think of any other way to work, and it completely ruins whatever effort you put into making your poem more original. This is probably most prominent in the end of the third part,

licking the blood from your wrists,
pulling on the stitches with your teeth
as you dig for the last tender place.

It's just meh, I've heard it/seen it/ read it before. It's boring and takes away from the other ideas you had in there that had potential to be interesting.
You want to be careful with everything you say, is it generic, is it thought through, is it interesting etc.

2. Your transitions are weak, you don't make any connection for your reader, and so they end up bewildered to how they got to where they are and how anything relates in your poem. You want to flow into ideas, overlap them so the reader understands the transition, it's like paving each step for your reader. For example it could just be something like (unrelated from your poem):

The colour orange --> Orange sun --> sun in space --> space --> stars in space --> gas stars --> gas and light --> etc.

and it doesn't have to be related, it could be your image of eating stars, that leads into, I dunno, spitting out what you ate back in the sky. It doesn't matter. You want that overlap in your poem, it makes a bridge between all that you’re saying.

3. Your endings aren't very good ones. It connects to the clichés, but also they feel rushed in all three, like you were trying to end it within x amount of lines. You don't want that pressured feeling, it leaves your reader unsatisfied, and well not pleased.

4. This is a personal opinion, so feel free to ignore this: I feel like you’re restricting yourself to a widely overused topic is not beneficial to how good your writing could be. I suggest you try for something interesting, or taking a completely different spin on something overused. Also, doing things like mashing together two different things and making them work with your words is always wonderful. Try something different. (but again that's just me)

To do you some justice, you've got some good stuff down here.

at night, your fingers flexed towards the sky
to unhook the stars, to catch them in your jaws
and run your tongue over the jagged pieces,

these lines in particular I enjoyed.
This will most definitely get a like from me.

Take from my review what you will, best of luck. : )

Kamas

Well, everybody else has given nice, long, detailed reviews it seems, so I shall spare us both the time and say AWESOME JOB. No, awesome doesn't even begin to cover it....splendiferous is better. It was certainly pretty disturbing, even a little stomach-turning in some parts, but everything is beautiful in its time. And this was a beautiful poem. The last few lines especially were great. Bravo!

Suicide has never sounded so mesmerizing! I'm HIGHWHITESOCKS, and I think your choice of words combined with this concept makes for a very effective poem. I especially like the line "I told you veins could break." The imagery is quite vivid, and I felt like I could see everything as it happened. Keep up the good work!
P.S. If you could read my short story "Ghosts That Linger" and comment, I would be very appreciative!
- HIGHWHITESOCKS

Hey blackbird,

I think this is my favorite poem of yours so far; it reads smoother, and it strikes more feelings in me than the others.

The first stanza is great. The yearning, the distance of it--it's nice, if such a word can be used here, to see the feelings expressed like this instead of the usual angst and drama. Here it almost comes off as reasonable, and it's a nice insight. My only nitpick would be that the last line is too abrupt; the flow until then has been this lazy breathless thing, but then you put the "love is like that" like a dam through it.

Second stanza has nice imagery, but I don't like it as much as the first. I think it could stand to being separated in two sentences, for one. As it is right now, the sentence does make sense but seems a bit too fractured and hesitant, which doesn't fit with the earlier tone.

Third stanza was also a bit weaker than the first, possibly because there's a bit more of the physical vs emotional (which wasn't that obvious before, but delightfully implicit). The details are good, but also seem a little extraneous, and the part between dashes jars slightly. But that last line? Is just great.

Wow. Usually emo/suicidal poems are terrible or whiney..... but this was amazing.

It hooked me from the start, and I didn't stop reading it. You language and the flow of this was perfect!I tend to be a fairly tough reviewer, but I honestly just loved this. You have some real talent!This was so good... I don't have anything else to say. Sorry if that's not helpful.

Please keep writing!You can only get better, and clearly, you're already amazing!

-Dreamy/Tori/Whatever you want to call me

Although I am no good at reviewing poems I will give my opinion.
I thought this was wonderful! It gave me tingles!
I found nothing wrong with it.
This is, as my friend would say, "That's deep man."
:D

Wow. This is amazing! =D Not only did you manage to write a poem of suicide with out it sounding whiney and pathetic, but your chooses of words are spectacular.

This was my favorite part of your poem. You began with a bang, and did not end dull.

"at night, your fingers flexed towards the sky
to unhook the stars, to catch them in your jaws
and run your tongue over the jagged pieces, but they held fast"

Also how you created you poem starting, I, was awful. ( I mean awe inspiring or full of awe not the new definition of the word.) It brought an interesting view on the poem.

Hey Blackbird!
Wow.. This poen really hit me, I really felt it. My wrists were turning themselves inside out, your imagery left me breathless,
Had to read it a few times to fully appreciate it, and unlike the other 600 people that have reviewed your piece I found the third stanza really gripped me, took me through multiple emotions. Kindve relieved but disappointed for her that she had ended up in a hospital, extreme sadness that she's sitting alone and that loneliness emphasized by shuddering plastic bags because you make it so easy to imagine and horrfied by this girl ripping stitches out of her wrist.
Well done, wonderful.

First off: excellent.
But, I would expect no less from you.

Now, I found this piece interesting. It's obviously about suicide, but it's presented very differently from most "Oh, woe is me," poems in that it isn't one. This is unique and interesting, more about physical pain and the remembrance that you're alive than anything else.
I'm not sure if I like this or not. I'm obviously not a fan of those big, overstated, "emo" poems, but this has an almost mindless feeling of pain to it, where the character is inflicting bodily harm on themselves without telling us why. It's an interesting contrast that while you keep their emotional bay hidden from the reader, you create an intimate relationship with the character reader by writing this is in second person. You pull them into it, while still holding a great deal of the story at bay.

at night, your fingers flexed towards the sky
to unhook the stars,

The flow felt a bit weird here; I'm still not quite sure why after mulling it in my head for a while.

The rest though, was flawless. I kept on looking for a line to post as my favorite, and kept looking, and kept looking, and finally decided that I couldn't find one, because I love them all. Sounds really lame, but each line holds a great deal in it and presents the subject in a unique, interesting manner. Excellent piece.

-Coral-