Suicide

What is love?
What is life?
Life is sun,
And love it's light.

True love is heaven,
And in it lovers reside.
And without love,
there is no life.

Maybe that's why my eyes are wet,
As I lay in my bed.
From my wrists blood dripped,
And from my eyes tears flowed.

I thought about my love,
I thought about my life.

I remembered all those moments we spent together,
I thought they would last forever.
But alas I was wrong,
My life is like a very sad song.

I remembered the first time my lips touched your cheeks,
It was our very first kiss.
I remembered the time when you whispered in my ear,
Now these moments haunt me as a nightmare.

But you said we werent meant together,
Then you left me forever.

I said I was strong,
But inside I knew I was absolutely wrong.
I was shattered ,
and parts of me were scattered.

Then from heavens descended a light,
It was truly a beautiful sight.
That light filled me with a feeling of ease,
And at last I rest in peace.

Blimey. That's depressing! But then, the title was more than enough warning of that.

One tiny thing, where it says "And love it's light." I get the feeling you meant to say "love is light", but I could be wrong.

I just hope this isn't how you're actually feeling! A good poem, though-it's good to see something which is genuinely "dark", rather than the usual teenage "my heart's been broken, and I feel like I'll never get over it," kind of thing. Not that I have anything against the latter, it's just nice to see something different.

Wow. That was deep. Very good, though.

I've read so many stories on this topic and you seemed to fit it all into one short poem. Good job!

I agree with Face Engine on the "And love it's light." It interrupts your flow, and I know you wan that there for meaning, but it might sound better if it's "And love is light." I know it goes against the message your trying to get across in that line, but flow is important in a poem. People who don't even know your meaning will at least know your flow. (Hey, that rhymes! ) Otherwise, I didn't see anything. It's a great poem and I'll be looking for your next.

Hmm, it's not a bad poem by any means, its actually quite good, but one or two things are irking me.

Firstly, you veer dangerously close to cliche in your choice of images. The whole blood dripping from your wrist thing could have been pulled from just about any emo piece on the internet. I know you didn't mean it that way, and this isn't nearly as bad as most emo poetry, but still- it's just on the wrong side of cliche. Try to be more original when writing about things like that.

The other thing is the rhyme you used. Here's the worst offender:

I said I was strong.
But inside I knew I was absolutely wrong.

Not to be to harsh, but that on it's own reads like someone taking the mickey out of rap music. I just didn't feel like your use of rhyme was neccessary, and you'd be greatly freed if you abandoned it.

That said, I enjoyed a lot of things about this, particualrly the slightly conceptual stuff i.e the love and light. It's a nice idea, and you connect to the poem's story well. Good work.

WOW O.O very deep... Love it! How depressing it is... I completely understand you!
I didn't find any grammar mistakes.
Some people might say that as you changed the rhyme scheme it would normally don't sound good, but this one worked out! Loved the flow.
Good work! Keep writing!

Read on only if you appreciate truly honest reflection. First of all, since you are only fourteen, the problems in this piece aren't permanent to any extent and you have an almost-infinite amount of time to better your skills as a poet, so don't interpret my comments as anything but a suggestion for extreme revision.

This is a bad poem. Utterly void of any idea I haven't already heard from a token emo and strung together by a laundry list of cliches, namely sunlight being love, death being tranquility, and the ever-popular method of cutting yourself when your two-day boyfriend decides that there's a new hot girl in town. This was, in essence, typical teenage nonsense that's going nowhere and has little to offer the reader in the way of meaning or even entertainment, because of the hazy ideal the thoughts are formatted in and the disdainful, choppy, and confusing style it was written in.

spike71294 wrote:What is love?
What is life?
Life is sun,
And love it's light.

This reads like a kindergartner's picture book. Life = Sun. Love = Sunlight. Is that really all you had to offer with this stanza? It's uninteresting (mostly because of the way you wrote it - like a series of bullet points) and above all else, simplistic. You don't need to hit us in the face with your definitions as soon as the poem begins, and certainly not so blatantly.

True love is heaven,
And in it lovers reside.
And without love,
there is no life.

Love = Happy. That's it, apparently; that's literally all I could find. So far, the poem is severely lacking in content, for you could have condensed these overindulgent stanzas into one line and be done with it.

Maybe that's why my eyes are wet,
As I lay in my bed.
From my wrists blood dripped,
And from my eyes tears flowed.

Should I care about the fact that your eyes are wet and you're lying in bed? Why? These two lines seem to me to be spun out of a desire to put some content and "setting" into an otherwise bare theme: "I'm so sad because my lover left me". I really can't see how this stanza helps the flow of the poetry at all, except to tell the audience that you're cutting. Which, by the way, is one of the most cliched, trite ways of killing yourself that one could possibly think of. You might as well have lifted this off the pages of any emo book ever written and it would be the same.

I thought about my love,
I thought about my life.

I lay there rejected,
Absolutely unaffected.

Or so I thought.

I said I was strong.
But inside I knew I was absolutely wrong.

First quoted stanza is weak and more of a description than anything; this did not need and does not deserve to be in a poem. Second stanza is again, simplistic, and the rhyme scheme that suddenly appeared out of the blue worsens this exponentially. Third and fourth stanzas are weak as well in their attempts to...what exactly is the point? Are you trying to surprise the reader? Clearly not, because we are supposed to know how you feel based on the title and the whole cutting thing above. So the "I said I was strong" stanza has no meaning to it and can easily be cut out without hurting the poem.

I was shattered,
And pieces of my heart were scattered.

Unless you have a good, poetic, and deep reason to say that your heart was scattered and shattered, that term is overused to the point where it should never be used again unless you can strongly justify it. Personally, I believe that you just threw that in there because it sounded "sad" and "romantic". Feel free to prove me wrong.

I stared into the mirror,
My face was serene.
I wondered how much,
This world could be mean.

Your face wasn't serene, your face was streaked with tears. How one can possibly cry and still maintain a neutral face is beyond me - you might want to look at your descriptions again, because they are contradicting each other grievously. The last line has extremely poor word choice and reminds me of something a 1st grader might say on the playground. Really, can't you think of something better to put there than "mean"? Or are you trying to remain true to the bad rhyme scheme you have throughout the poem?

Then a heavenly feeling filled my heart,
A feeling of ease.
And at last I attained freedom,
At last I was at peace.

"I died and was happy". That, in two words, summed up the cumbersome and amateur-idealistic last stanza, which is not good at all because if the first stanza was weak, I would have expected the last stanza to make up for it. A good rule of thumb for poetry is to make either your first or last stanzas strong and poignant so that the reader can go into the poem feeling good or come out of it feeling good. You've done neither.

In general, the word choice needs to be worked on, the ideas need to be hammered out (right now they're just jumbled vapors put inside a container and shook up until an emo pops out) and the rhyme scheme is, honestly, terrible. In some places, you do ABAB, then you have no rhyme, then you do AABB...be consistent or don't have a rhyme scheme at all.

I can't truthfully recommend that you continue to work on this poem. Start from scratch; you can use the basic idea but put some additional inner/outer conflict and perhaps a journey into how you became suicidal in the first place. Be sure to use vocabulary that is 7th-grade-or-higher and for optimum poetic value, don't use rhyme, make it free verse.

Ok, sweetness. The poem's opening stanza is pretty weak. It doesn't grab you, or even make much sense:
Well that's not exactly true,
but maybe it is.
Cats are fury.
True.

See... It's a bit "qoui" if you get my drift. I see where you're trying to go, I often try it myself and come out with the same problem. What you have to think about is, how you can convey your meaning to the reader; just because you understand it, doesn't mean that everybody else will... Trust me it's a very easy trap to fall into.

Another little gripe is the unusual rhyming structure - when you're writing a bit of an avent garde poem, it might be advisable to keep some typical conventions... Just so that the majority of your readers don't get put off.

Please don't take what I have written as disparagement - it isn't meant to be at all. I often have the exact same problems.
If you want to talk about it a little more in depth, PM me.

Love
Kris
x

Hey Spike!

I've been doing video critiques a lot lately, especially for poetry because it's a really cool way to see how your poem sounds to the other person. Or people, considering that my sister, the lovely Sgt Salt, is helping me critique. Anyway, basically we read your poem and we commented on it. And... um... my sister and I are kind of crazy together, so if we laugh hysterically, it's because we like being around each other, not because of your poem.

http://revver.com/video/1348226/affilia ... f-suicide/

Anyway, hope this helps! If you can't see the video or you don't understand us or anything, just shoot me a PM and I'll explain.

Hey there, Spike!

There's good emotions here - but it's all a bit overdone. Make it original, make it your own.

Use concrete imagery and vivid descriptions.

Love, hate, happiness: these are all abstract concepts. Many, maybe all, poems are, deep down, about emotions and other abstractions, but it's hard to build a strong poem using only abstractions - it's just not interesting. The key, then, is to replace or enhance abstractions with concrete images, things that you can appreciate with your senses: a rose, a shark, or a crackling fire, for example. The concept of the objective correlative may be useful. An objective correlative is an object, several objects, or a series of events (all concrete things) that evoke the emotion or idea of the poem.

Really powerful poetry not only uses concrete images; it also describes them vividly. Show your readers and listeners what you're talking about--help them to experience the imagery of the poem. Put in some "sensory" handles. These are words that describe the things that you hear, see, taste, touch, and smell, so that the reader can identify with their own experience. Give some examples rather than purely mental/intellectual descriptions. For example: "He made a loud sound" versus "He made a loud sound like a hippo eating 100 stale pecan pies with metal teeth".

Hope this helps.

Sarah
xxx

Eh. Wow. There are some mixed emotions going on in this forum. *scratches head* I can see where they're coming from... but you're only a novice! Aww.

Well... I thought it was good. *shrugs* I thought the rhymes weren't as forced as a lot of the poems I've seen, and I thought it conveyed sadness. Maybe didn't convey depression, or anguish, or whatever, but it got *some sort* of a emotion across.

I think... I think it's sweet. I think it's a pretty decent poem, although yes, the last stanza is a little cheesy *laughs* no, it's not Oscar winning, but please name me one director who won an Oscar with his first movie? ^_^ That's what I thought.

Keep at it, and write, even if you feel discouraged by the comments. There was one really harsh one, but I can see where he's coming from - he's only trying to help. There are a lot of poems about suicide on this site, and many of them read very similarly to your own. He's trying to help you to become more creative with your words, ideas and rhymes. Read more of people's poetry, and then read their reviews. Reading what other people think of poems that you think are incredible can really affect - in a positive way - how you write, and how you sculpt your words to get the message across.

I don't want to critique this too much because you're a novice, and suddenly coming down on you like an anvil doesn't seem right to me. ^^;; However, at least take on board some of the comments, and whatever you do, don't let it get you down. The only thing you can do is get better. *hugs*

Bye-de-bye!

It was depressing, sad, but super! How did you come up with that. you gotta tell me how to write like that. I love writing a reading poems. But your 14? that's amazing! The " Love is light" is awsome, that's a really cool ( in a poetic way) poem. Its deep and expressing, i like it a lot

keep writing

Okay. Everyone pretty much said what is wrong and what is right so it's a bit pointless for me to critique.

What is love?
What is life?
Life is sun,
And love it's light.

True love is heaven,
And in it lovers reside.
And without love,
there is no life.

The first stanza is a bit cliche while the second stanza is better,though it can still use work.
Why? Just like Galerius said, the first stanza is like a kindergartner's book picture. The second one just overdoes it. I understand that you want to explain it, but the beginning wasn't really good and therefore stanza 2 isn't good.

Then a heavenly feeling filled my heart,
A feeling of ease.
And at last I attained freedom,
At last I was at peace.

Nice ending. I just feel the first 2 lines and the last 2 lines don't have anything to do with each other.

All in all it's not really a good poem. You can still improve it though.

wow. that was an amazing poem. it was extremly deep though... i hope thats not how you are feeling. i love the "And without love,there is no life." because that is so true! and serously for a 14 year old... nice. I can't wait to see some of your other works =D

hi guys never had so many replies for a poem.
thnx guys
and i cant decide
if u all like it or not
cause some of them say my poems fantastic
and others say its crap.
i think non-emo people dont like such poems.
watever thnk ya for ur replies
gud or bad dnt care.
and for da last time
thnxxxxxxxxxxx

Oooooh! This is better than your last. I love your new stanzas! Oh, and I'm not emo and i love your poem!

I love your last three stanzas. Those are my favorite.

I think I saw a few minor errors, but you could probably just proofread it and find them. Thank you so much for telling me you edited this. I haven't read a really good poem in a while.