The man made of water

I was lying down in the rain.
In the middle of a busy street.

Water filled my eyes and ears
making passersby look like flitting shadows.

They stopped and stared at the crazy person lying on the ground.
I didn't care though because you were not there.

I blinked my green eyes and rain mixed with tears ran down my frozen face and onto the hard sidewalk.

I glanced up into the grey sky, at the constant downpour which seemed to fall out of nowhere.
I laughed at this and somewhere in the distance I heard a panicked voice.

I felt it seep through my clothes and onto my cold flesh, run down my waist and creep down my back, like hands of ice on my skin.

I was a man made of water.

They fell onto my lips and onto my tongue,
descending down my parched throat.

With each drop came the need for more.

Through the storm your face came to me.
I knew you were close.

I felt you kneel down beside me and take my head into your arms.
Gently.

Tears that were not my own, fell onto my face.
These tears ran deeper.

Hey Matt!

It seems like in your poem you use lots of repetition and such of the same image over and over again. But this can get rather boring. Less is more, especially in poetry. I remember in one movie that I really like (Bladerunner) the main evil guy says something along the lines of, "We are like tears in the rain." And that image is totally beautiful. Mind you, he didn't have to say it over and over again... that was unnecessary. But he said what he needed to once and that made the difference.

So say what you need to and nothing more. It'll be awesome, honest.

Thankyou for your advice, and for taking the time to review. I appreciate it.

Hmm! This could be really good, after some serious editing. I agree with Snoink and I think it was just too repetitive.

Water filled my eyes and ears

Hmm... not satisfied. You should edit this line out I think. A tad bit too corny for my taste,

They stopped and stared at the crazy person lying on the ground.

I don't think this really ties in with the style of your poem. I might tweak the words a bit.

felt it seep through my clothes and onto my cold flesh, run down my waste and creep down my back, like hands of ice on my skin.

Run down your waste?? I think you meant waist.

I blinked my green eyes and rain mixed with tears ran down my frozen face and onto the hard sidewalk

I thought this was a bit choppy. Maybe split it into three lines or try tweaking the words.

OVERALL

I thought this was a little odd to read, to be honest, but after some editing it could be inspiring! Hope this helped,
winie*

Hey! You asked me to look at your poem again. Anyway, when I said what I did, I mean you need to condense it into the bare minimum and to make it sound vibrant and interesting... it's not enough to change a couple of words around... not when it's repetitious like your poem is. And that's because we, as writers, are often repetitious when we lack good images. Trust me... I've just trimmed 8000 words from a novel because I would often use repetition when I should have been using stronger images.

Um... it's rather hard to explain! I'll show you... below is your poem, redone in my hand. Does this make it good? NO. I am not the best writer around and I'll be the first to admit it. Plus, I'm not very good at poetry. But I took the content of your poem and shifted it around, emphasizing what I thought were the important, interesting, fundamental parts and taking out a lot of the little details that I thought were more fitting for stories and less fitting for poetry. So you lying on a sidewalk? Out. Good for stories... bad for poems. Your green eyes? Out. The fact that you miss a girl? Out. Mind you, missing a girl can be really good and all that. But you want to add something more than just that, otherwise it seems unnecessary.

The most important thing for me was that you were exposing yourself to water... it seemed like you were letting yourself "drown" (in a sense) and let the water overtake you, which was interesting to me. So I focused on that image, using some of the images that you had already created and reformatting other images to suit my fancy.

I also made up a really sucky ending. Emphasis on the sucky part. I've been dealing with vascular grafts and hemoglobin in my classes, so I decided to end it the vascular sort of way. It sucks. But, with the way I reformatted it, it seems to need another ending, so I made it up really quickly.


I let it drown me; I let the water
overwhelm and choke my senses.
It seeped through my clothes and onto
cold flesh, run down down my back and around my waist
like tiny pinpricks of ice.

And I let it race past my lips and tongue--
It welled in my throat.

But you came.
You came and knelt down beside me,
taking my head into your arms.
Tears that were not my own,
fell onto my face.
These tears ran deeper.

And I, the man made of water,
felt my capillaries burst.


And yeah, the poem that I just made up sucks. That's not the point. The point is by tightening up your poem and focusing on the important images, you won't have to rely on repetition and can instead use strong images that carry more impact. After all, watching a guy run around circles is one thing... watching a guy hold a trophy from a race he just won is quite another. So focus on the important things, always. A little goes a long way.

Okay, so... Huh. I'm not really sure what to say about this. I mean, you have a nice idea, I suppose, but any good that I can see in this is completely smothered by a whole bunch of other things.

MattJF wrote:I blinked my green eyes and rain mixed with tears ran down my frozen face and onto the hard sidewalk.

This line is incredibly long! I mean, in poetry you have to know when to stop, and when to start. The fact that you don't use any punctuation in here makes me rush towards the end without really paying attention to what you're saying. That's not a good thing. I had to make an effort to focus on any one part in this. When you don't add commas and the like where you would naturally pause anyways, it distracts the reader. Never a good thing.

That was just one line, but many of the others were like that as well.

As for anything else I might have said, I can't remember. Please forgive my weirdness right now. If you want me to come back and think more on this, please don't hesitate to ask. I want to help you, but I can't hold a thought in my head for long right now. Sorry.