Orca Song

Orca whales swimming in a too small sea
for their tales I used to dream of
the message in a bottle we missed
on the beach, too busy making castles
the waves broke again and again
in suits that our brothers wore
to their formal parties, straight edge
and laced with musky beer.

Tangent, mi amor! Thanks for posting this.

Now, your poem can basically be broken up into three parts!

1.

Orca whales swimming in a too small sea
for their tales I used to dream of

I love, love this imagery! It brings forth some fantasy orca pictures, like this one:



You know... enclosed in a small space, but dreamy and powerful nonetheless. So I really like this beginning. The orca is very powerful and the description of it being in a too small sea make it seem larger than life so that it fills up the sea. And then to dream of that conjures some of these images in my mind.

2.

the message in a bottle we missed
on the beach, too busy making castles
the waves broke again and again

This reminds me of Jimi Hendrix's "Castles Made of Sand"... which is awesome! The song's lyrics are actually rather sad... they recount tales of people who built their hope on the fleeting and lost everything. So yeah... I think you can expand on this scene more! Also, see if you can connect the powerful with the fleeting, I think that would be excellent!

3.

in suits that our brothers wore
to their formal parties, straight edge
and laced with musky beer.

I kind of love this too... you start with the powerful, fade to the fleeting, and then end with this scene that makes us wonder, "Is this all there is?" So I love how you dwindle down. But I would like the contrast more, so definitely boost this more. I want to be able to see the brothers clearly... right now, there is only a vague sense of shapes and smells. I want more.

So yeah. Develop these three sections more.

Okay, so I'm pretty sure you just did three things to me:

1.) You made me care about the environment
2.) You made me sad about my childhood
3.) You let me worry about wasting my time doing trivial things while the world shrinks around me.

Really good job, Pengy... Not a lot of things can do that to a stupid candle like me.

/likes

Neeee-chan! <3

So! I make no excuses. I am horrid at critting poetry, but for you I try, yes? =D

As Snoinkerific said, the imagery is lovely; I especially like this section:

...for their tales I used to dream of
the message in a bottle we missed
on the beach,

It invokes a lovely feeling of nostalgia. =)

One thing that seemed to stick out to me is that it seems to run all together. I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, but it makes me want to read it really fast paced, and it wrecks the flow for me, which makes me sadface. =( Though maybe I'm missing the point completely. As I said, and will say, I am not poetry-inclined.

I did enjoy it, though, once I got over my initial speed through reading! I loff your pretty pretty words.

Imouto-chan

Hi PenguinAttack,

First things first. This immediately put me off because of the fact that you use too much... pseudoimagery, as I call it. You describe a term, place, or being in ways that doesn't lead the reader to any kind of better understanding of the situation. For example, you say

PenguinAttack wrote:
in suits that our brothers wore
to their formal parties, straight edge
and laced with musky beer.

Yeah, okay, suits are laced. You could delve into this a lot more. Are their ties stained with alcohol dripping off their lips, hastily dried? Does the smell wrap its way through the fabric like incense smoke to a vengeful God of intoxication, heavy in the air as it curls around and into your nose? You don't need to make this too dramatic, of course, but it needs to be better than "so-and-so is laced with beer". What does that even mean? You need to take the reader from A-Z stopping at a reasonable number of steps, not just take a huge leap from the beginning to the end.

Like you said, this poem is more about emotion than content anyway, so I'm not going to go into whatever plot this might have. The two "sections" of this poem, however, were not connected, and the saddest part is that you had so much potential here.

Well, okay, they were connected, but very clumsily so. Dolphins to beaches to... suits and parties. You can do better. Beer, water, a sea to swim in and drown in. Humans are addicted to both, we revere both and curse both when they flood our homes and minds. I don't know. Something to link the imagery of the sea to the pretentiousness that seems to emanate from the men standing silently in line at a wedding (at least, I had the impression that it was some sort of wedding). Don't just leave these images stranded in time. If you take a moment to force them to join hands in holy matrimony, the children of their feelings will be much better off.

Right now, this is half-baked. Fix it.

Hope that helped,
Galerius