Let the Red, stain my arm.

My head is like a tree in the forest.
If it breaks and falls and nobody is there to see it,
Do you hear it?
The face of death seems so close,
I fog the picture with my breath.
The sight of life can't be real.
So close in my grasp.
My palms are bleeding from the clench.
This might be a matter of selfishness,
But it doesn't matter in hell.
My stomach grumbles, eating itself
Food isn't worth the time.
Tunes cheer me up,
Enough to lift my head up,
Restless...
I'm a ticking time bomb,
With the time left,
In the single digits.
Lost control of the remote,
To keep the time going.
Turn it in fast forward.
Keep the time, tocking.
Tell me that when everything goes to hell.
We wake up, to another day,
On a world we don't deserve
A life lost through living
Resisting those urges to let the blood
Fall from the tip of my wrist, to the bend in my arm.
They call it down the road,
I call it, addicting.
Let the messages carved in my arm remain.
Allow the pulse slow,
And come to a stop
Free me from this living hell.
Whisper in my ear,
It's all going to be worth it.

Review. If you want?

Hey there, Quack. I'll start by saying that this type of poetry--suicide notes and the thoughts between reality--it's not my cup of tea. However, while I pulled the poem up expecting a disappointment, you gave me a couple of golden nuggets within the miles of sewage.

...and mind that, when I say sewage, I mean 'things I don't like'.

So here's what I suggest:

My head is like a tree in the forest.
If it breaks and falls and nobody is there to see it,
Do you hear it?

That is brilliant and needs to stay in the poem, no matter what. It makes the reader think, which is a great goal to have. The next two lines are similar:

The face of death seems so close,
I fog the picture with my breath.

These two lines could be wonderful, but you miss the mark with the second of the two. You conjure the image of death's face, but then convey it to the image of a mirror without really melding the two together very well. This could go to say that your face seems dead, or that death is a mirror. Just try to tweak it a bit for imagery's sake.

And then we hit the main body...which I do not like at all. Don't get me wrong--it's good poetry for a high school student with issues and is a magnificent catharsis. However, it does not make a good poem to write about streams of red and how life is hell. By the time you hit college, every poetry enthusiast will have read poems like this a hundred times--don't disappoint anyone by conforming.

What I suggest with this particular topic is the minimalist strategy. Take out the cheesy and destructive parts and let them head to the grave. The entirety of your point--the fact that you're about to die--can be portrayed through implication. That is to say, let the reader haunt themselves by realizing that it's a suicide note without telling them that it is. Does that make sense?

Now, the last two lines haunted me, and that's the only reason I'm reviewing this: because it has potential.

Whisper in my ear,
It's all going to be worth it.

In my head, death said this. Why did death say it? Death said it because I connected lines 4-5 to the last two lines. The rest of the poem was unnecessary at that point. This is the sort of thing people will quote and post as their signatures, or write in eulogies. Don't miss your mark by bogging beauty down with gunk.

So what do I suggest?

Lines 1-5, and the last two. See how that feels. Between line 5 and the final two, incorporate more writing, but not what you have in the main bulk of this poem. Implication. Implication. Implication.

My last piece of advice is not to delete anything in this poem. One of my favorite reviewers on this site told me over and over again to keep anything that I write, either to learn by or to return to at a later time. I suggest the same for you.

I hope this helps. PM me if you have any questions.

-Lumi

Lumi called out all the nitpicks, so I'll get straight to talking about the poem itself.

It's deep. Strong themes of depression, exhaustion, the narrator has given in. It sounds like he's tired of cutting to keep away the pain, that now he wants to take that final, irreversible step. This is shown quite clearly in the last five lines:

Allow the pulse slow,
And come to a stop
Free me from this living hell.
Whisper in my ear,
It's all going to be worth it.

I hope, and I mean really hope, that this isn't your personal suicide poem. Though it probably is. If it is, I really advise you to get some help. Talk to someone, maybe someone on YWS. And if it's not, then I probably sound pretty stupid right now.

Anyway,

TIGERSPRITE

Well, Quackermoo this is certainly a very dark poem. this is the kind of things that i myself write. i enjoyed the deepness and darknativity(is that even a word?) of it. very well done. God! i sound like my English teacher! anyway, i am new and this is my first review. so here come the constructive critisism...... Some parts of the poem flow but others don't. Some parts start to rhyme and then it kind of declines into just no flow at all. i think that maybe you could use different words so there would be no flow if that was what you were going for. good job overall though.