When you sing

When you sing,
the world listens on bated breath.
We’re all waiting for you.
Don’t you realize
the admirers you have?
We all stop
the world stops
to know your song.

I wish you would
open your ears to mine.
It may not be
as beautiful
as yours.
But my song is there
nonetheless
and I wish you would listen
to it.

It’s not just any song.
I composed it
myself.
Because your song
awakened a creature
inside me
that I thought I’d tethered down.
You can’t undo this damage
and you can’t reclaim your song.
But it’s fine.
I don’t want you to do either.

Others sing so beautifully
to you,
and you pretend not to care.
But, oh, you notice.
Just not mine
Don’t worry,
I won’t stop singing it.
I can’t.

I’ll wait forever
even though I know
it’s useless to hope.
I’ll lie here
forever
and wonder
what our songs
would sound like
together
even though
I’ll never know.

Keep singing
and the world
will listen.
And I will
listen too.
Your song makes
my knees buckle
and my fingers tingle
and flutters in my stomach.
And wraps itself
unbreakably
around my heart.

Oh, my heart!
It’s only held together now
by these songs.
Yours, ringing in my ears
even when you’re not singing.
Mine, which it
composed,
struggling to get through,
written for you.
Though you’ll never know.
I’ll have to be content
with what you’ve given me,
your song.
It will never be enough
But it’s all I have of you.

Comments, suggestions? This one has been forming in my head for a few days but I just finally spilled all out onto paper (ahem, word) about ten minutes ago

--Cassie

Hi cassie17,

This has no place in literature, poetry or otherwise. It's basically a writer regurgitating out senseless emotions and feelings into one giant clump of indeterminable ideas, meshed together with dubious line spacing and no imagery.

cassie17 wrote:When you sing,
the world listens on bated breath.
We’re all waiting for you.
Don’t you realize
the admirers you have?
We all stop
the world stops
to know your song.

I wish you would
open your ears to mine.
It may not be
as beautiful
as yours.
But my song is there
nonetheless
and I wish you would listen
to it.

These first stanzas are so boring, it's a full-time job for the reader to muster enough strength to keep going. "I wish you would open your ears to mine." That line is just one example of the amateur nakedness of this piece. Compare your emotions to something else; when by themselves, they self-consume and go nowhere but when spiderwebbed out to metaphors and other such devices, they can take a life of their own and help to relate to the reader. Clearly, this isn't happening.

In addition, what is wrong with your line breaks? Why is "nonetheless" deserve its own line? Same goes for "It may not be" and "beautiful". It doesn't sound aesthetic at all, not even the type of harsh beauty that could possibly be accomplished by such choppy breaks. Instead, it sounds like you're a robot pausing every three words. Revamp the entirety of your choice in lining and read it out loud to yourself; make sure that the mind does not find uncomfortable speed bumps where there are none.

There's no imagery, absolutely none. If I were to tell you "I am happy", is that going to produce any visceral reaction within you? It shouldn't. In the same way, some imagery and description is always needed in a piece; this poem sorely lacks that. You claim that your heart is unfulfilled and fortunately, you at least use the idea of "song" to convey your feelings, but unfortunately don't go any further. Use the song metaphor and expand on it if nothing else, and describe.

I am loathe to critique a full piece of literature when every paragraph and stanza has the same problems over and over again, so I will leave it here and simply say that the mistakes made above are systemic and cyclical. Go through every stanza in this poem and fix it accordingly.

In general, it doesn't matter if you're new at poetry or not; poetry is not just a garbage can where you can throw up everything that's inside of you and present it as art. Please take this advice for any future literature you produce.

Don't do anything with this poem beyond using it as a raw template for possibly something else. It's flawed and the core and cannot be fixed as a whole. Nobody wants to hear you whine.

Hope that helped,
Galerius

Thank you for this critique.

However, I don't believing I'll be posting anything on YWS from here on out. In fact, I won't return to the website. If one of the admins would delete me, that would be fine.

I'm sorry if my "regurgitation" was so painful to read. I guess I was hoping for some open-minded readers. Poetry does not all have to be the same. When you're describing emotions, what true imagery can be used? And personally, I loathe pieces that have imagery puked all over them. I apologize for my personal preference. I guess it doesn't really matter anymore.

Thank you for helping me realize again why I quit this website in the first place, but I assure you I won't be back.

--Cassie