Slow-motion

night air sticks to the insides of my ribs
dizzying breathlessness on the verge of
tears, terror –
.....................can you feel it pulsing now?

passion never really was our strong point
but in the end our fragility was
echoed in carefully-chosen synonyms
lust and love; romantic meets cynic:
saccharine poets have nothing on us.

down to our last life, we fall, outstretched palms
stained with ozone and forgotten lies.
“a penny for your dreams” is all you say.
you’re answering questions I never asked,
but you don’t need to bother: I only
want to know the truth.

honey, to stop now would be suicide.

It's the horrific Iambic Pentameter that's scaring everyone away, isn't it?

*applause and cheering*

Ok, basically this is so I get some soup. I don't know a thing about poetry. So I'm not going to be very helpful.

Yeah, so I have no idea what to actually say other than that I enjoyed it and it's a pretty good deal if I get soup for reading this. Win win situation.

What does Iambic Pentameter mean?

Thanks El! *gives soup* Iambic pentameter is where there's 10 syllables on each line in a stressed/unstressed pattern, so it ends up sounding sort of lyrical. Shakespeare is a good example of this.

Lexy - Thanks for the crit. I agree with you about some bits having transitional problems, but out of curiosity, which parts stuck out to you? Is there anything you see that I could add or take away to fix this? I'm just trying to figure out exactly what you mean.

The rhythm and flow were excellent, as you happened to have planned to do.

I have problems with the punctuation in the first stanza, you use semi-colons to seperate different ideas, but the first three lines seem seperate but they are spared no puncutation attention.

The last line sounds like a Fall Out Boy song, I'm sorry to say.

It's well-structured, and well-written, it just doesn't feel that original. It feels almost like you were trying to hard to get that vocabulary right, and sound cool and like a great poet, but in the end the message was forgotten. I'd like to see a rewrite of this, with better transitions between lines and more obvious connections.

Woo hoo! Resurgence of the awesome poem!

I bow in much impressed-ness at your mad skills of iambic pentameter. I had to write a poem last year for one of my classes in iambic pentameter and it was... um... horrific... to say the least.

This, however, is pretty and flowy and shiny! I didn't feel like there were any particularly earth-shattering ideas in the piece or anything, but they way it flowed was so nice that I couldn't help but like it (not that I tried to dislike it or anything, LOL). I especially liked the right alignment of the question, because it seemed to set it off in just the perfect way.

Plus it was fun to read out loud and I love poems like that. Thanks for the read, Skye!

EDIT: And I'm totally fixated on the word saccharine, so extra brownie points for using it.

Applause for your use of iambic pentameter: it's superb. I especially liked the way you got "fragility" to fit. The vocabulary was excellent also, and I love the line:

stained with ozone and forgotten lies.

Good work, keep it up!