The Depiction of Dreams

A/N: Another experimentation. I'm not quite sure it was successful but it definitely challenged my way of looking at poetry. (Title is subject to change)

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A thin visage along the nameless city streets etched
with dusty words full of hollow abhor, basked in sunlight
until they are burnt.

But eagles eyes, they soar above the crowds and beyond
to reach its most primitive state. Watching existences blink
then fade down the avenue pavement.
I wish - to be - nothing more

Selling those simple gimcracks on the street curb, everything but hung
in the loopholes of present prosthetic dreams.
Coins have slipped through the pockets – faculties too.

No longer one of the Abraham men, simple in their goad
Frauds up their sleeves, a raving laugh on their lips.
Look at me - In the eyes

An ocean iris pearled with reality
Forbidding and brassy in the bite.
Hey Lady - Yes you

A sudden new existence mingled with a nickel or two.
What I live - Is more real then you'd ever dream

Kamas wrote:A/N: Another experimentation. I'm not quite sure it was successful but it definitely challenged my way of looking at poetry. (Title is subject to change) - My aim was to look through a homeless person's eyes in a way.

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A thin visage along the nameless city streets etched
with dusty words full of hollow abhor, basked in sunlight <--- Awesome imagery + opening.
until they are burnt and shriveled with speculated bitterness.

But eagles eyes, they soar above the crowds and beyond
to reach its most primitive state. Watching existences blink <--- (eagle's) What is "it" in the second line?
then fade down the avenue pavement.
I wish - To be - nothing more

Selling those simple gimcracks on the street curb, everything but hung
in the loopholes of present prosthetic dreams.
Coins have slipped through the pockets – faculties too. <--- Love it!

No longer one of the Abraham men, simple in their goad <--- I think you misused "goad". I may be wrong.
Frauds up their sleeves, a raving laugh on their lips.
Look at me - In the eyes

An ocean iris pearled with reality
Forbidding and brassy in the bite. <--- Love this line too!
Hey Lady - Yes you

A sudden new existence mingled with a nickel or two.
What I live - Is more real then you'd ever dream <--- Powerful last two lines! Stellar.

Overall great poem! I love the italicized lines at the end of some of the stanzas. I would call this a successful experiment!

Hi Kamas,

Beautiful. There are rough parts to this, to be sure, parts that made me want to put away the poem. But after every such line is another that brings this back to its overall status as something truly worth reading more than once.

Kamas wrote:A thin visage along the nameless city streets etched
with dusty words full of hollow abhor, basked in sunlight
until they are burnt and shriveled with speculated bitterness.

Third line here is one of those ugly lines I mentioned. "shriveled with speculated bitterness"? Say it out loud to yourself, really. It sounds like the reader is being forced to chew on glass, bursting his gums with the shrapnel of a attempt at "poetic voice" exploding in his face. Take that last part out. We don't need you to tell us bluntly that there's bitterness. We should be able to glean that from your imagery. "until they are burnt" is enough to end this stanza, although I'd be interested if you could replace "shriveled with speculated bitterness" with something better.

But eagles eyes, they soar above the crowds and beyond
to reach its most primitive state. Watching existences blink
then fade down the avenue pavement.
I wish - To be - nothing more

Last line is among the greatest and most timeless that I've seen in poetry for quite some time. This is one of those sentences that will go down in poetry history as an idea and concept wrapped in layers of itself, a perfect sphere of nothing and everything that allows the reader to plumb into the theme. I honestly don't know how much of this complexity you intended, but it works. "I wish to be nothing more." "I wish to be, nothing more."

Ultimate. Sublime.

Like I said, though, with every line that shines forth through the darkness, several lines in this piece create that darkness in the first place. "To reach its most primitive state" is one of those. Again, you're trying to make your point without bothering to weave it into the poem. That doesn't work and the reader can see through it instantly. Change it.

I do not have much to say about the last part, and for once, it is for a good reason. Your poetry has improved tenfold since when I first reviewed you, and it's going to go as far as Andromeda galaxy if you allow it. Please continue this, and remember what I said earlier; your main problem festers within the fact that sometimes you break out of the poetic shell you've carefully carved and attempt to let light in without filtering it, thereby blinding anyone who reads those particular lines. That needs to be worked on. Keep it up.

Hope that helped,
Galerius

Hey Kamas, I really liked your poem. You use a lot of imagery. It was way fun to read. Extremely good for an experiment! *Thumbs up*

Hi there Kamas. I saw this and decided to pop by with a review.

So, I'm really liking this poem. I had to read it a couple of times to really see what it was talking about, but that's a good thing for you. I'm rather dense with poetry, so if I had to read over it twice it means that it was just right. If I really understood it after just one reading, I would say that it is too simple, while if it took me more than three or four, I would be saying it is confusing. But, as it is, it's that safe balance between revealing too much and hiding too much. Very good on that point.

I have to say that the way you talk about the homeless in this poem really does kind of poke at my worldview a bit. There are a lot of homeless in Honolulu, and after a while you kind of become dull to them. This kind of reawakened how I look at them, made me realize that they are still people. It's a tiny thing, I know, but if you can poke at me like that, someone who doesn't go for that kind of stuff, I think you've done very well.

Overall, very good. You have a few lines here and there you need to tighten up, but Galerius called attention to those better than I could have. Just tinker with those and you should have something great here. PM me if you have any questions or comments.

Good job, and good luck.

-Conrad Rice

Wow, Kamas that was really something. That is pretty good for just an expirement! I don't know what half those words mean...but sounds like you used them right... ^.^ I like this a lot! You keep expirementing:)

Interesting! Very well done! ^-^
A couple of the words struck me as a little... dunno, off, i guess. "Abhor" and "Faculties", for instance... somehow not very poetic. xD
But, other than that, a profound and deep experience...

Hello Kammie! Congrats and featured work. This poem had some beautiful, beautiful moments, and as a whole it's hard to critique. But, when looking at individual phrases in here, certain things just don't make sense to me.

A thin visage along the nameless city streets etched
with dusty words full of hollow abhor, basked in sunlight
until they are burnt

The adjective hollow doesn't seem to fit with "abhor". Abhor is such a strong, passionate word, and tagging "hollow" to the beginning seems to take away some of that power. For me, when something's described as hollow, it loses its intensity. I don't know why. Hollow is such a passive adjective.

Also, what is etched with dusty words? The thin visage, or the nameless city streets? It doesn't really matter-- the following description could work with both. Still, though.

But eagles eyes, they soar above the crowds and beyond
to reach its most primitive state

Eagles eyes? Perhaps you mean eagles' eyes, as in, the eyes of the eagles?

And its? Its refers to a singular word. (The dog wagged its tail.) But the two nouns you've used in this phrase are eyes and crowds, both plural, and which would therefore require the possessive pronoun "their". It makes me wonder, what are you referring to that reaches its most primitive state?

Losing your subject. Beware of it. It's the most common problem I find in good poetry.

I wish - To be - nothing more

Gal's right. This line makes the poem. Part of me wishes you could use this towards the end, just because amazing lines leave the most impression on me if they're at the end, but it's not something to lose sleep over.

One thing I want to mention-- I wish you hadn't told us at the beginning that you were trying to look through a homeless person's eyes. Like we talked about, poetry needs to speak for itself, and after reading that, I knew what to expect before even reading the first line of the poem. Knowing the overall theme and idea behind this up front took away some of that thrill that comes with unraveling the meaning to poetry. Don't spoil it for us. If you've done your job as a poet, readers can see what you intended without being told.

Keep writing, Kammie. Your poetry's good.

~Evi

This is very interesting. I wasn't sure at first what you were trying to achieve with the italics, but I guess, someone is speaking. I was also unsure about the dashes in "I wish - to be - nothing more". Then again, I guess you could be saying "I wish to be nothing more" and also, at the same time, be saying "I wish [for] nothing more". Maybe? xD

I liked this imagery: "basked in sunlight / until they are burnt."

"Frauds" as a plural sounded weird to me, but the internet tells me it's perfectly fine, it just sounds a little odd with the s on the end. Might just be me. Your poem has a very interesting tone, quite different, and while I feel some of it went over my head just a tad, I liked it. It sounds... very grown up.

EDIT: Oh, I almost forgot. At the end, where you say "What I live - Is more real then you'd ever dream", well, isn't anything that's in life more real than something one dreams? Unsure about this line. That's all!

What I live - Is more real then you'd ever dream <-- then should be than

I actually didn't really like this. It seemed really detached from everything and when you mentioned the main narrator in the first person, italicized bits, it seemed kind of lame, like you were trying to make each stanza seem to come from the heart at the last minute. Something like this:

POET: Ooh! Ooh! This image looks awesome! And... let me see... I can use this ambiguous, over-used adjective to describe the noun. BUT! Since the adjective has NOTHING to do with the noun, it'll be construed as deep! YAY! Oh wait... the whole poem seems detached. Let me add a line in italics, just in case somebody wants to have something to relevant to follow.

...yeah. So it really didn't work for me. And the first stanza was flat-out awful.

However, this is my favorite part:

But eagles eyes, they soar above the crowds and beyond
to reach its most primitive state. Watching existences blink
then fade down the avenue pavement.

That's mostly good (although try rearranging it to be stronger). The rest is clearly experimentation.