A Drop Of Life

I'm not positive this is the right forum for this but I hope it is. The idea for this poem came from two comic strips I read online on a website called asofterworld.com. I really liked two of them so I combined them and this was the product. I'm not wonderful at poetry but I like to try it every now and then. Please, rip it to shreads, I want this peice to be good (And I know it's not capitalized I didn't want it to be.) I JUST REWROTE THIS

~peanut~




I can hear her.
Sweet melodies gliding
on the air.
Like a shadow her scent follows.

I breathe it in,
bitter humor, mocking.
Black steam swirls
in the pure air.

But as I sit in bed,
the memories come back.
They taunt me like ghosts
poking and prodding my emotions.

Her ghosts, her presence,
all around me.
My bones chill and I can
smell the coffee on the
air, that isn’t there to warm me.

Slowly I stand, feet dragging,
friction against carpet.
My feet burn but the ice
doesn’t melt.
It consumes me.

The front door smiles,
cracking open.
The air wraps around me
like arms and I can
hear her whispers.

The neighbors glare,
knifes cutting into me.
But I let them; their
eyes bare into my soul.

The grief is taking over me.
But as a tear falls
it drops life into the ground.
The life I took from her.

And a flower blooms.

I liked it, Sarah. The thing that I didn't find was the rhythm. I might be wrong, but when I read it, I didn't find it.

Who is she? I saw her in the first stanza as well. I wanted to know who she was.

"sweet like her smile
and bitter as her humor.
tears squeeze from
the corners of my eyes."


I loved this last stanza! I really did.

"they think i am insane,
grief taking over me.
but where my tears fall
a flower blooms."

Overall, great job!

Hey Peanut!

The main thing that bugs me (which probably doesn't bug anybody else) is how painless this seems. As somebody who has had a head injury before, I can tell that head injuries are pretty much full of suck, to put it lightly. So when you have your narrator fall, hit his head, and then start thinking about the girl that he loves... it just seems rather silly to me!

However, I do admit I am a sucker for these two lines:

but where my tears fall
a flower blooms.

I just don't really like the rest of the poem.

i loved it, peanut! i thought it was AMAZING!!!!

Lovely! Best poem i've read in the past half hour!

K.

So, we've got your cahracter, grief, pain, etc... manic with the dilirium this mysterious figure left her.

I think you need to work on image. Instead of creating a form, and then creating your characters experience of it, meld the two into one continuous body.

For instance, your character focuses on her smile, that smile should focus back. your character feels this "her" in everything around him. So, figure out the similarities that the girls smile has to your characters surroundings.

A door? A mouth. Windows? Teeth.

Your character is being consumed, eaten by this anxious delirium he(i'm assuming he, forgive me if otherwise) is experience. Focus on that. The feeling of being digested between walls, of being covered in the acid of someone else's love. The toxicity of bodily fluid, the coldness of her humour, her elegance, and how that matches the coldness of the neighbors stare, the coldness of the wind, and hte cool elegance of the perfectly manicured suburb where this could take place.

In real life how we feel about something CHANGES what that something is. For instance, these "words" right here? If you didn't speak english, this would be gibberish, but when I say "water" you know what I mean, right? you have an image, a picture?

Well that's a poetry in an of itself right there.

However, to draw the reader more fully into your world, you have to show them what your character is feeling by making hte character travel through a world that has been anthropomorphized, transmuted... permanently changed to fit the character's emotions.

So, lets say... my character is sad. My character doesn't "drink" the coffee, my character chokes down a taste of embittered regret, and that regret doesn't just "sit" in the character's stomach...

No, it stews there, it soaks there, and it bubbles up out the character's mouth.

So, take every object in your poem and make a metaphor to being swallowed with it, then choose which you want to keep, which truely fit hte theme, and with are fully discardable.

Oh, and, KEEP WRITING! Don't write pieces to "perfect" them, if you're truely improving anything you wrote a week ago will be crap to you now. Just keep writing, writing, and writing, and learning from it. dissect your work, dissect others works. Read write read write. Don't stop till you get enough.

Hey Sarah!

So, although love poems are done very often, it's still possible to make them work. I think you're partway there, but it's by no means perfect.

I'd say that you have some good elements to this poem, but these elements are kind of weighed down by a lot of other stuff.

For example, the format you've written your poem in. I know that the whole uncapitalised thing can sometimes really work with a poem, but here the 'i's just blared out at me. Did you put them there because you thought they added something to the overall ambience and feel of the poem? Or because you wanted to?

Also, the point of your poem: where is it? Obviously, the narrator's focus is on 'her', but by the end we've moved onto an entirely different point which, to me, is kind of confusing. Basically, you're jumping around a little bit here where it might be better to stay put. Obviously you want your poem to be artistic and to have some variation, but you want to have something which everything hangs around. I get a little of that here, but sometime near the middle I start to get left behind. (Maybe I'm just too slow...)

Anyway, linking onto that last point, I want you to consider your ending. I don't actually like the majority of it. Look at this:

every morning i sit outside
and the neighbors stare
from their porch swings.
their eyes bare into my soul.

they think i am insane,
grief taking over me.

Now, what does the first stanza do for your poem? We swing from focusing on the girl, to suddenly focusing on him - can I assume the narrator is a him? - and what he does. This stanza, for me, adds nothing to your poem. And the first two lines of your last stanza bug me a lot. I love the last two lines, but those two ... don't work. You haven't mentioned grief much, so why should it be the focus point of your last stanza?

So, what can you do with this?

As Snoink said, the whole 'fall' thing seems a bit unrealistic and painless. I don't have too much of a problem with that, but if you're going to have him fall, why not do something with that? Why not have the pain or something link to the rest of the poem? (Sorry, sorry, sorry if this doesn't make sense).

What I'm basically trying to say up there is that you have some good things in this poem and you should expand on them rather than jumping away from them. My two favourite parts are:

and the air slaps me.

(It seems quite forthright and I like it. Takes away the flowery elements and leaves you with something good.)

but where my tears fall
a flower blooms.

See, now both of these (especially the second) are ideas that can be taken way further than their two lines. Obviously that's up to you, but I would recommend building up on the good stuff, yes?

Hope this helps!

~Amy

You're getting somewhere with the edit, maybe. I mean, do you feel like you're learning? Cause you're generally the best judge of that, gotta hand it to you. There is more to be done here though.

Half of poetry is what you DON'T show, just like half of understanding is the words that go unspoke. Notice how any close couple or family, or group of friends has an unspoken agreement that looms over every spoken agreement?

That unspoken agreement is the shadow that makes the light, well, light. Similariy, in poetry what isn't shown exemplifies what IS.

Now, learning just what should be shown and what shouldn't be shown is a complex process, and an ever developing one because each time it's sligthly new, slightly different, because each poem is a different circumstance, carries a different feeling. Usually, what you want to do, is ACCENT those qualities that make your poem different.

You, right here, are pedaling pain and loss and longing, and love, in a bundle. Millions of others have, true, but you want to deliver a SPECIAL KIND of bitter-sweet that isn't touched by those millions, because whatever side of us you're showing through your work here is, in some way shape or form, unique. The pain nad love that you have experienced is different, so that should show through your work.

An interesting excercize with any piece is called FLESHING THE SKELETON. What you do is this... take out any and all expendable words, until you have something that reads like,

"I hear sweet songs glide air"

That doesn't make any sense, but it shows you what you're trying to communicate, at it's core. All superlative words, meanings words like "on, over, through, with, in, without" are taken out. They give texture and meaning to a poem, yes, but are fully malleable.

Now that you know the core of what you're trying to communicate, you can choose superlatives, adjectives, etc... that work well with your general mode of thought. That fit the general emotional undertone of the poem.

So...

"I hear sweet songs
glide as her whisper
through air."

now, the next form you want to display. WAIT!

Hypocrit's definition time!
Form: Any sensation or character worth mention in a description of any sort.

So, the next form you want to mention is scent. Now the scent is currently belonging to her, but I'd like you to reread my earlier advice. Not the first post, just the bit about shadows and light. Reiteration of "her" works sometimes, but maybe you'd like to leave her as a shadow, lingering a bit like the memory she has become to your character. Eh? I'm gonna run with it.

Leave "her" our. Don't reiterate "her" or "I" unless absolutely necessary. It's usually down out of laziness. MOST of the time people reiterate possessive type prop-nouns it's because they CAN'T THINK OF A SMOOTHER TRANSITION. Don't be lazy, force yerself to think.

scent flutters apartment.

Flutters is NOT expendable. Why? Because it adds to the overall theme, it works well with glide, etc...

"I hear sweet songs
glide as her whisper
through air,
flutter like scent
through this apartment."

Eh? See how it just reads nicer? I'm not the best with spacing, to be honest, but the wording. Not bad, right? Right. We leave "her" our of it, because we know she's there. You, the narrator, know she's there. If you were talking about this incident, whatever it is, to yourself... would you need to reiterate that she, her, is part of it?

now, you know she's there. And then, you know what this allows you to do? Reiterate with IMPACT. If you leave "her" and "she" in the shadow then when you say HER! we know it as a roar, a sudden admittance of person, a flash of light on a previously silhouette drenched form!

You could continue with...

"Her scent.
I tried to...." blablabla

So, got it? We makin progress?

So, try the FLESHING THE SKELETON technique, leave nothing but bones, then pencil in the flesh, the muscles, the rest.

Hey butters! I don't know how I'm going to follow the great reviews above, but I'll try.

My bones chill and I can
smell the coffee on the

I just wanted to quote these lines, and point out how choppy, how unclean they are. I'm not one for continuing sentences in poems, and this is no exception. But, it's not only me not liking them, it's just that when I read them, I have to pause and think because they just don't sound right. Why are you mentioning coffee anyways? Did I miss something?

Moving on from that.

This poem, though beautiful and painful, is a bit emotionless. Instead of just telling us a story, tell us the feelings that go along with the story. It would become so much more beautiful and poetic.

I like how you took this to the next level, but I'm not sure I like it. I can easily assume from the first few lines that the poem is about teen angst. And, I'm choosing which teen poems go into my school anthology, and all I can tell you is that there are a lot of poems written like this. That's no problem, you just need to go farther out with it than others. You took it to the next level, but still not far enough to outdo your opponents. (haha)

Wonderful poem.

Questions/comments, PM me.

Classy

Hey Sarah!

Eeh. Not too crazy about this one. It's got potential, but it really needs a lot of polishing before it gets to final draft quality. Right now it's about the level of a standard first draft, so you've got nothing to fret over right now.

Sweet melodies gliding
on the air.

Two things. Firstly, where are the sweet melodies coming from? I'm guessing that he's hearing the sound of voice, so you might want to mention that. Secondly, I don't think that something can really be 'on' the air. Maybe 'in' would be better.

Like a shadow her scent follows.

Again, two things. First, there should be a comma between shadow and her. Secondly, you seem really unfocused in the first stanza. First it's her voice, and next it's her scent. Maybe you can stick to one thing per one or two stanzas.

I breathe it in,

I think this would be better in this first stanza, as it would create a powerful and sudden end. Then you could just put a semicolon after 'follows'.

Black steam swirls
in the pure air.

What is the black steam? Is it really there, and what is it supposed to represent? Try to explain a little bit more.

But as I sit in bed,
the memories come back.

Okay, this bit was a little confusing. Haven't the first couple of stanzas talked just about the memories? Maybe this would be better at the very beginning of the poem.

They taunt me like ghosts
poking and prodding my emotions.

Her ghosts, her presence,
all around me.

You've got two instances of 'ghosts' really close together. Try and see if you can find a synonym.

the coffee on the
air

Doesn't make sense. It would either be 'Coffee in the air' or 'Coffee on the stove'.

-
I couldn't find any specific nitpicks in the second half of the poem, just large things that bothered me overall. So, here are my overall thoughts:

It's all over the place. It really is. This feels like a blurry picture with too many objects in it; there isn't a clear focus. You skim various events in this poem so briefly that we don't have the time to connect and understand why they are happening. Like, what was the purpose of the coffee? And why is he being killed? I think you eliminate a chunk of the subplots and just try to focus on either of the two main themes of your poem, the dead girl or the fact that his neighbors want to kill him. That way, they'll have more time and space to themselves and you can fully dive into the characters and story.

Come find me if you have any questions.

-Elinor