An Act

I know this probably has a lot of punctuation errors and the rhythm is off in places, but it's just something I randomly wrote and haven't really proof read it all that much. It's a tad bit long, sorry!

An Act

You enter the house,
Expecting to be hit by the hospitality
The mother’s supposedly built this family on.

Instead you meet the oblivious father,
The angry older daughter
The introverted young one.

Be a fly on the wall,
Enter the realm of make believe
Enter the place where everything’s an act.

Watch the acidic words drop from their lips
Burning whomever they touch,
Irreversibly hurting the unseen.

She plays the victim,
The father defends her,
The eldest opens with brutal honesty.

You try to leave this horrible place,
Opening every door,
Cautiously peering in.

Just to find another room,
Another argument,
Another tear filled eye.

You run around the inescapable house,
Everyone’s a prisoner crying out behind frozen lips.
You find comfort in the young one.

Locked in a room, she shares her secrets.
It’s always been like this,
She can’t remember a time when it wasn’t.

Her mother’s slowly going insane,
Her father’s contemplating divorce,
Her sister screams to deaf ears.

Watch the tears fall from the innocent’s eyes
Feel her heart accelerate as the door opens,
Letting a new person enter the house.

The curtain rises on the dusty stage
The lights flicker above as the actors replace the family
It’s show time.

You meet the new family,
The charming, solid provider,
Who unconditionally loves his wife.

The sensible woman
Professionally balancing work and family,
Greeting the guests with big smiles.

The angry older daughter
Set in her stubborn ways,
Not changing for anyone.

The outgoing younger one
Who just needs a listening ear
Whose tears have dried away.

Color fills the scenery,
Tension builds
Awaiting the guests to leave

For the curtain to lower,
For the encores to finish,
for the anger to return.

Their life’s an act,
Waiting for the audience to praise their performances.
Hiding behind the cold curtain.

Good theme, solid writing but this seemed to me to be much more like prose broken up into small poetic sounding lines. If you just put them in sentences you would have a page describing a family misery. You describe it well but the language you use is a bit bland, the metaphors and language, while apt and appropriate, are rather pedestrian. I have this trouble as well. What i usually do is sit on a poem a while and reread it slowly, letting the imagination out like recess, and see what immediate associations i can make while reading my own work. Now i sound preachy and kinda bitchy but it helps me.

Good solid work, but go a bit crazy sometimes.

Keep up the good fight

Hey ya my man, yes you are a "man".
Your poem is the outcome of a complex mature thought process, that's for sure.
your poem seems to reflect a reality of someone close to you, doesn't it?
[quote]It's much easier to write when you're sad. But you can end up isolated and depressed because you almost need to put yourself in that situation to have that angst to write from.
Natalie Imbruglia

well, i'l start with the structuring and aesthetics of your poem.
You follow 3 sentence symmetry, solid structuring.
But you wrote in blank verse and this is a sticky patch as
(don't get angry with me here, I'm telling this for your own good)
your poem lacks a certain rhythm which is the beauty
of blank verse poetry.
Please work on that.
Though your sentences are straightforward in their composition, they do seem
a tad more as parts of a prose.

Now, coming tio your poem and its content and theme.
you write how a visitor is able to see through the act of nicety a family
puts up in front of him/her , and is empathetic towards the youngest one.

It seems that their own incompatibility with each other,
bursts forth on some incidences and how they again hide these with their
false acts of a happy family.
"The act" as u call it, i find to be an apt title to your poem.

P.S. : I'll continue with this in a new reply, cause i gotta go. something urgent came up.

Thanks for the reviews guys! It isn't really poem like, I agree. ha ha

errtu2.

Don't worry, you weren't being bitchy at all.

The_Vizier

Don't you worry either, I take criticism well.