A Turning

There are and remain to be
certain things that I will always feel
stirring beneath raising dim recognition
though never directly touching

abiding forces within
always churning and demanding
unceasing attention and forgiveness
for crimes not committed

The world instills fear into the soul
at a young age
and so it feels shame and hides away
where it cannot be touched or even looked upon

(when will I ever stop destroying myself
and ignoring the inner chaos
that constitutes the real me?

will it ever end so that I may begin again?

or will I doom myself to self degradation
as I have done every conscious moment
not spent bettering myself?)

I am a ridiculous creature of habits

yet less ridiculous than the idea of human
a creature of the mud who's
endless dreams and ambitions
can only end in mud

and so with my eyes above the refuse
I leave my soul enveloped
where at any moment a passing wind
can kick dirt back into my face
blinding me
from the very fact that I am blind

I am continually cleansing my third eye to no avail

We are born with all knowledge within us
and as we grow our understanding shrinks
a perfect state of being degraded
by paltry human conditioning

Existence is too intimate to be pondered upon
By apes with thumbs and pandemic beliefs
I would rather distance myself from the entire thing

Where space and time run parallel and zero and infinity meet

and all thoughts suddenly cease
that is where you’ll find me
buried deep within the concrete miasma
of maya, this endless moment

wow, this is deep. i enjoyed reading this alot.

the only thing i would recommend is to add puncuation. commas, periods ect.
also check your capitalization.

Read it out loud and when you pause , a puncuation is needed.

great job, i loved this.

kim

I would reeeally love this poem to be, um, coherent? I don't want to sound really, really mean, but I think I'm about to. This is, as far as I can tell, a list of abstract words and phrases strung together with no real thought put into their construction. Streams of consciousness are fun, and long sentences are not a crime, but I do love it when poetry MAKES SENSE. Next time, don't post a stream of consciousness. Post a stream of consciousness that's been punctuated and edited so that regular people can see what you're getting to without wasting their time just trying to decipher what you've written.


Better luck next time,
Colleen

Um, regular people suck. Why would I ever want to write something for those sods? You write something for me to enjoy, then maybe I will consider writing an ode to jesus and my cat and highschool melodrama, trip to the grocery store, etc... What I'm trying to say here is, regular people suck, and I refuse to aspire to mediocrity.

bent wrote:Um, regular people suck. Why would I ever want to write something for those sods? You write something for me to enjoy, then maybe I will consider writing an ode to jesus and my cat and highschool melodrama, trip to the grocery store, etc... What I'm trying to say here is, regular people suck, and I refuse to aspire to mediocrity.

Look at Incan's work. His work is hardly mediocre, and yet he employs concrete imagery to get his voice out. Look at other poets. They do the same. It is one thing to be deep and quite another to be vacuous. This is more of the latter.

At no point did I say this was deep. What is expressed in this poem (for the most part) is common knowledge. What I am saying is that I would rather venture forth into different territory than sit here and adhere to the beliefs and practices of people who have shown me no concrete validation of such boasted skills. It's not that I am thick-headed and readily disagree with all criticism up front. It's more that I find myself having almost no respect for most of the young writers on this website (note, this is not on attack, it is an honest observation). And yes, I know that as soon as I express something that somebody does not agree with on this website then they will immediately attack the work on which it is being commented, because of course children will be children, so let me verify that this particular poem has no bearing on what is being said. It was written, as cade pointed out, as a stream of conscious and I lazily chopped it into stanzas and posted it as-is. Yes, it is lacking in imagery and punctuation, but it is at least somewhat rich in ideas, something I have found so infuriatingly lacking not only on this website, but in nearly every comment I have been given thus far.

If it is indeed stream of consciousness, why get so defensive about it? So someone didn't like it. Suck it up, princess. People have different tastes. When you post your work for others to see, they're not all going to proclaim it as the greatest poem ever written.

That being said, I actually liked it. It seems to be an observation of self, and I like your word choice and metaphors and such. It maintains the same feel throughout. I love the connection between the "blind" stanza and the "cleansing my third eye" line. Nice connection.

Still, I'd like to see a better attitude out of you. Sorry others didn't like it, sorry they think everything needs to have punctuation, but you need to just chill and accept it.

Snoink wrote:

bent wrote:Um, regular people suck. Why would I ever want to write something for those sods? You write something for me to enjoy, then maybe I will consider writing an ode to jesus and my cat and highschool melodrama, trip to the grocery store, etc... What I'm trying to say here is, regular people suck, and I refuse to aspire to mediocrity.

Look at Incan's work. His work is hardly mediocre, and yet he employs concrete imagery to get his voice out. Look at other poets. They do the same. It is one thing to be deep and quite another to be vacuous. This is more of the latter.

I get about... Two paragraphs deep into his work and find myself bored. His poetry, on the other hand, it quite good. Incan is not the poet I would list as my example though, I would say Surreal. Then again, I like his stuff, hence why I said it. That's why you said that too, I guess

I like the poem Bent. Like... C+. Make it shorter, discard some of the stanzas that you believe suck and keep up that search for ingenuity.

P.S. I share your opinion but you know what this place is just as we all do. It's not called Young Writers Society for nothing. Let them grow ><

Yes, it's true that I have a bad attitude when it comes to taking criticism from this site. But that's mainly from having had even my best works completely ignored and/or misinterpreted in the past. Heck, I've even gotten good reviews that pissed me off because the person completely missed the point. And of course there's the obligatory "wow, that was deep man, like seriously, wow". Such disappointments add up over time.

Normally, I could care less about punctuation, but I think a bit is necessary here because as is, it's rather slow going, and all your ideas hit against one another. Though maybe that, in some way, does work in context. I think that the thread of thought running through everything needs to be coloured in a bit more because it doesn't seem very organized at the moment.

I liked the last stanza. An image without being really concrete. Though I'm confused: "...within the concrete miasma/of maya, this endless moment", the "maya" part: did you mean Maya like the ancient civilization or... well, actually, I don't know what else it might mean. (actually, I found the same reference in another one of your poems and was equally confused...)

I liked the third and the last three stanzas. The rest sounded rather like ranting to me.