Eating Worms (Redux)

Spoiler

Eat this alive, please! If you read the original "Eating Worms" then you'll notice the changes in both length and formatting. I haven't set it to a rhythm yet and I know there is no rhyme scheme, but I swear--I swear there is a deep meaning behind it all. 100 points to the first one who gets it right.

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Prematurely, there was a bastard born;
he lacked a name but he was breathing,
so his mother didn't kill him.
His hair was soullessly black and
his eyes never opened to the light.

His first steps were on fire ants;
those pitiful legs swelled and blistered,
and he choked on tears.
And he cried for his mother in the summer heat
as she smothered her worries in Marlboros.

On the first day of school, the bigger kids
kicked him in the auburn dirt and
made him eat a worm.
He cried as he staggered home to his mother,
but lost his will as she blazed the trail of a broken home.

In the heat of the spring, his father held him closely
and breathed on his neck. He felt like crying but knew
that if he said a word, everything would fall apart,
and it’d all be his fault...
So he kept quiet while his father hurt him and drank
his tears with each empty kiss.

In the sear of summer, his Camero hit a tree;
he writhed out with a gash on his face.
All the girls were scared, and
they dropped him in laughter and razors.
That was when he found his skin
slipping apart by the seams.

Later that winter, with smoke in his teeth,
he told the doctors they could take their
prognosis to hell. And they said he was too sad
and made him take medicine for the love of his mother.
So he swallowed each damned pill and
chased them with fire.

That was when he stopped feeling
and knew he would die someday.

Between heavy breaths, he made his solace;
with each bead of sweat he reprimanded his
mother for the fire and his father for the cold.
And between lustful heaves, he blanched his soul
in the scalding current of her gasps.

Prematurely, there was a bastard born;
she lacked a name and she wasn't breathing,
so her father didn't save her.
Her face was soullessly black and
her eyes would never open to the light.

Wow, this is amazing. So full of feeling. The writing was great, and i fund no errors. I understood it all (though the true meaning could've been something beyond my grasp), but it did take me a minute to understand the relation between the first and last stanzas.

Personally, I feel like this isn't a poem. The English is perfect and your sentences full; it's a short story that you just added line breaks. I felt no rhythm, only words. There's no problem there, though. This is just my opinion, and I thought I would give it.

This is certainly one of my favorite works on YWS.

This was really good. Normally i avoid poems on the longer side, but this one was gripping. For some reason it reminded me of something Johnny cash would have wrote. It would be awesome if you could set it to an epic, almost homeric meter (dactylic hexameter) or something with that long drawn out sorrowful feel.

Parts that confused me:

"In the sear of summer, his Camero hit a tree;
he writhed out with a gash on his face.
All the girls were scared, and
they dropped him in laughter and razors.
That was when he found his skin
slipping apart by the seams."

Not quite sure what you meant with the razors, but my guess is that he was scarred from the accident?

"Later that winter, with smoke in his teeth,
he told the doctors they could take their
prognosis to hell. And they said he was too sad
and made him take medicine for the love of his mother.
So he swallowed each damned pill and
chased them with fire"

Smoke in teeth...another way of saying that he was smoking? and that after the prognosis he chased them down with fire...I read this as lung cancer or something, but he dosen't care a fig and keeps on smoking.

"And between lustful heaves, he blanched his soul
in the scalding current of her gasps."

I'm just not feeling the imagery here, it's probably just me: whenever I hear the word "blanch" I think of boiling vegetables and you add the word "scalding" which just adds to that thought. That image, for me, just dosen't jive with the mood of the rest of the poem.

As for the meaning: a kid is born into a broken family that was not at all fit to raise him, mother loves him no matter what, like a good mother, father beats him like a good drunk. So he gets beat then he gets tough, starts drinking and smoking himself. (scarred? if i read that rightly) finds he has a some sort of chronic illness, tries to find consolation for his life faces and finds peace with his inevitable death, but has a daughter of his own, he choses "not to save her" and thus save her of the pain and woe he faced in his life. I hope I'm on the right track and that the review was helpful

-The Modernist

I found this very interesting. It was definately dark and strange but it's good to be broad about what you read.

I thought it was well written, there weren't any gramatical mistakes that I could find.

I didn't really get it, but that's just because I haven't read a lot of poetry like this. I didn't think the length was bad at all and I think it told a story for sure. It was a sad story.

I know this review probably is not very helpful but I always leave a note at the least after I read something. But I'm really sorry I can't be of more help.

I liked the words you used, like "the sear of summer" "Blaze of the broken trail of home" "auburn dirt." Everything was really interesting visually, as in the images that I got in my head, and I got lots of them which was really good! Thumbs up.

I'm not convinced the title fits with it, titles are important in poems!

Keep up the writing!

Love and stuff,
Rory