Counting His Days

6 posts
User avatar
Gender Female
Points 890
Reviews 3
Within himself,
Beyond those cold indifferent eyes,
Somewhere along the bitterness,
Beneath his soothing lies.
Between his apathetic remarks,
From his molded carved face
Straight through his melancholic heart
He was simply just counting his days.
I'd rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I'm not.




User avatar
Gender Female
Points 6403
Reviews 312
Hi peace. I'm glad you didn't go too dramatic in this poem, which is what suicide poems tend to be. However, there were a couple of things that bothered me. For example, your first line is so much shorter than the rest that it doesn't really work. You also used a lot of adjectives, and the poem ends up reading like a list and leaves the reader with a lot of questions. Like, how did he die/kill himself? What made him do it? Who did he leave behind? I get that this was something he kept to himself, and it must have been a shock to his friends and family. So use this opportunity to tell us his story and really make it powerful and I think you will have a very moving piece of work. PM me if you need any more help.
xxxxxx
'life tastes sweeter when it's wrapped in poetry'
-the wombats


critiques // nano




User avatar
Gender Male
Points 32885
Reviews 2058
Hello Peace!

Within himself,
Beyond those cold indifferent eyes,
Somewhere along the bitterness,
Beneath his soothing lies.
I like how you keep this from being melodramatic, but I don't like this sentence. It's a fragment, so I don't see this sentence going anywhere. What is within himself? You're just saying that something is within, something is beyond, it's somewhere, beneath.... but you're not really saying anything with this sentence, because like I said there isn't a main verb. I'd just try rewriting it, perhaps, so that it isn't a fragment anymore.

He was simply [s]just[/s] counting his days.

The word "just" weakens this line.

In your last sentence, you should probably add some more punctuation because the last line is its own sentence, but you don't have punctuation showing it.

This is a really great poem because you haven't overworked the emotions with lots of bad adjectives. However, you do have a lot of adjectives. It's a wonderful start, but like Kiss said, try to show the emotions instead of list them. Can you describe the feelings, vividly, so your reader can sense them too?

I do really love the last line. :) Best of luck!
“It's necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo




User avatar
Gender Female
Points 890
Reviews 3
Thanks so much Kissthewitch and Suzanne for taking the time to read and review it.
I'd rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I'm not.




User avatar
Gender Male
Points 1659
Reviews 223
...I guess you got the message from administrators about the rules :) It's so nice when someone actually reads these things...
Attachments
Ha-ha (269).jpg
Ha-ha (269).jpg (40.9 KiB) Viewed 162 times
Dreams they come and go...ever shall be so...




User avatar
Gender Female
Points 3225
Reviews 365
Excellent. Short yet very good.

I agree, the first line is a bit too short.
Also, get a bit more into the suicide theme. If you hadn't mentioned it was about suicide, it would have taken me awhile to realize.
You don't need to tell a story, I like what you have here, but make it more clear to the reader that this is about suicide.

Good work!
Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
-Catullus, Carmen 85



Kindness is the language the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
— Mark Twain