Thirteen

You spent hours making sure you hair was just so
and now - this is it! First Disco! your dad drops you around
the corner, you wait 'til he leaves, join your friends
and then, you brace yourself and totter down an alleyway
imagining it a catwalk and you the Next Big Thing!
You pull a mix of vodkagintropicana from your bag
and pass it around, shivering, shaking,
pretending like it doesn't tear your pretty pink throat apart
and then you rush out onto the streets, laughing, falling,
skirt blown by the wind, drunk on Being Drunk.

You huddle together for warmth, a pulsating day-glo bubble.
A long, cold, nerve-wracking wait. Goosebumps spell out
codes on your bare arms. Your underwear, which looked so
Teenage-Super-Star-Cool in the shop, is making you bite
your lip in pain and your heels hurt and your tummy hurts but
then - Euphoria! - you're in! A rush of heat, of joy.

This is it, this is Life, this is Growing Up, hold on tight.
But - it's not quite what you dreamed. The boys
not quite so perfect, the girls not quite so beautiful.
Just a hall, a dirty old DJ, a group of people who
look like you, talk like you but seem to know what to do
better then you and your feet hurt and your tummy hurts
and your eyes start to burn and

a boy pulls you to him and his skin is rough,
his braces cut your glossy lips and he takes you
behind a wall and fumbles around in your skirt,
his hands rough and maybe, you imagine, dirty
from the chips he ate before he came,
from the cigarettes he smoked outside,
and you wonder if maybe maybe maybe maybe
this isn't all it was Cracked Up to Be.

Mmmm...lets see. I think the main problem with this is the words. I mean, how wordy it is haha...that sounded bad at first. There are just too many filler words...a, you, it, and, the, is, he...there is just too much.

I like the idea...it would be very appealing to youngsters, but it needs a little work on the wording I htink.

I quite liked this It is something that i can relate to, as I'm surea lot of others can. Maybe girls more than boys. THe one thing i have to say is, although your intentionally repeating the word 'maybe' in the last paragraph, i think you have used it a tad too much. Try taking one or two of them off. In saying that though, ii could just be me so...

good job
in_too_deep x.x.x

I agree with in_too_deep. Sometimes, there is just too many 'maybes' in the last paragraph, but you could work on that.

I was just like this when I went out the first time, so older children can relate to it a lot more than younger children.

RR*

Chanson,


This isn't working for me in its current form.

The layout of the piece seems to beg for reading it as parallel streams - the "fixed" standard-angst poem and the "variable" part that gives the reader a set of meaningful ideas. I thought many of the choices in the variable portion were interesting, but I doubt that this was an exercise solely designed to let the reader construct a set of poems from piece parts.

I am wondering if the overall effect you're seeking might be better accomplished without the fixed part. The idea of communicating that a poem is never read the same way twice is a significant challenge in a single dimension, so I invite you to fat-trim and fat-trim and fat-trim this until you are down to your skeleton.

I understand that you're trying to "evoke emotion" and I really enjoy seeing a serious attempt, but you should not lose sight of the goal: to write a poem.


Best,
Brad

I like it alot! The end part is my favorite....
Good job!