Miss Nostalgia

I wrote this about one year ago, on an afternoon where I found myself really angry at somebody, so if you find a line that doesn't make perfect sence, it was my fury and intensity in the moment that probably screwed it up. Enjoy, comment, like. (:

Nice try but you can't weasel out of this one this time.
Welcome to your mistakes, there's your bed of heartbreaks
And all you have to eat is the dreams you never let me keep.
This is what it's like, the dark alleys of the bright life
Where you exiled me till death do I part.
There's the Coroner who lives in the corner
Don't befriend him; he's to safety as fishes are to land.
There's the baker and his wife, and their kid with the revolver
And the Cult filled with magic and knives and weed.
I went to that school over there...
Got beaten with their words so badly that I barely made it.
But what does this matter?
What matters to you besides that girl who doesn't love you?
I never saw you stop and watch
The tears fall down my face when I saw
That my hopes were just my imagination gone astray.
So when those prolonged tears start rolling down your face
I'll be a long time gone.
Someday you'll wind up here with all the bums and the fugitives.
Let's hope that by then you’re as mad as me.
Insane is in babe, because sane is safe and boring.
Besides, who needs the slow life when death stalks closer every 60 seconds?
This is a mad house, and I'm its longest resident
So it's as free as the freedom I will never see again.
You're wrong when you say that this is hell;
It's the only home I've ever known
And it's alright as long as I belong here and not where you are.
Soon you'll be begging so low your nose will touch the ground.
What makes you think that by then I'll be able to forgive you?
Throw down the pedestals, shut the satin curtains;
You're no king, and you'll soon realize you’re nothing without me.
I hope I made you feel Nostalgic.

Wow I really like the outpouring of emotion here, I think that it is what the poem's all about so I won't judge you on grammar or your writing, I agree with you that your anger at times does affect the flow of poem, but it is really really strong

Keep being angry haha

Hm... Amazing description, definitely. I would love to read more of your work and compare. I felt no rhythm with your poem, though, which brought it down from great to good in my book. I am a little confused about your subject. It's like Dracula plus Alice plus any given chick flick. Cool idea, yes, and it worked, but I feel like the reaction of the MC is not natural in the ways she originally wanted him (?), and assumed that he would want her in the future. I understand the MC is supposed to be crazy, but it really doesn't make much sense to me... eh oh well. I just wish I know what the guy (not the MC) was put in the asylum or other place, or went there himself... to get the MC, perhaps? So many questions... you should really use this as a basis for a novel. I think it would work better.

I. Love. This.

The outpouring, the absolute I'm-letting-go-of-everything-onto-this-piece-of-paper f***er, is AMAZING.

Every phrase is a piece of diamond. Not gold. Gold is altogether too gaudy, and this is altogether too beautiful. And I totally felt a flow in there.. a rhythm of anger and fury, wild and raging, but an organized chaos all the same. This might be my favorite on the site. No joke.

Excellent.



-Coral-

Hey writtenacrossmysoul (what may I call you that is shorter?!) -

Your phrasing and juxtaposition of ideas reminded me a lot of one of my favourite poets, Richard Siken. And I have faith that, with some tweaking, you will be able to imitate his writing perfectly.

I'll start off by saying that what I like about the style - this style (his or yours) - is its surety in its own incompleteness. Life is a series of unrelated, incomplete incidences, and thus likewise should the art that imitates it be. However, it is nigh impossible - I find - to get any kind of meaningful overarching theme or metaphor across, other than this series of broken-bodied images, snapshots of each scene that got indelibly burned into the mind of the narrator. So. What I am trying to tell you is this: as a general rule, I prefer coherency, symmetry, completeness, perfection, an extended metaphor because of its harder and deeper impact on the reader. Half-eaten ideas that take up only a line at a time tend to have no collective impact (and generally appear rather unskillfully written on the part of the poet)...unless, that is, they are written in this manner that you have used.

Here, it matters little that the art as a whole is terribly incomplete - what matters is the way you string our reading of it. I read it continuously - for the most part - because there is a kind of bizarre surreality to having a series of incidences linked by only tone and narration, a kind of oratorical strength in the unspoken acknowledgement of one's own inability to tie up life into one tight knot.

What you have to aim for, then, is not perfect completeness, but perfect fluidity. I guess I am refuting what I usually advise people (and that is because I think you have the potential to pull this tricky style off with a bit more practice) - instead of life being a web of interconnected events, it's a haphazard string of disconnected ones. And the only way this style will work, in all it's incomplete glory, is if the reading of the text is totally fluid. And also if there is little awkwardness of phrase.

Here, it's not.

One big reason for this is the way you've decided to write out the lines. I think you'd be better off capitalising just the start of every sentence and not the start of ever line. The larger capitalised letter immediately asserts some importance to that starting word, thus disrupting the flow. Also, think of this poem like a river, rather than a pendulum - i.e. this is not a poem where rhyme has much place. And why is that, you ask? Because for the incompleteness to go unnoticed (and even be adored), you've got to have stunning fluency like a stream of water, rather than a tick-tock bouncy pendulum of rhyme, which instead detracts from the oration and makes it seem childish and unintended, rather than professional and smooth.

Also - issues with flow/awkwardness:

Nice try but you can't weasel out of this one this time.

I'd like to see a stronger, more aesthetically striking beginning. While the conversational tone is fine, the language here is altogether too chatty and colloquial to give the narration the smooth, streamlined effect you want.

Welcome to your mistakes, there's your bed of heartbreaks
And all you have to eat is the dreams you never let me keep.
This is what it's like, the dark alleys of the bright life
Where you exiled me till death do I part.

Here is the flow issue that continues throughout the piece. It reads like a series of bang-bang-bang statements (possibly in part due to capitalisation of each line) rather than something more rolling, liquid. Play around with your enjambment (and remove the rhymes; that should help).

There's the baker and his wife, and their kid with the revolver
And the Cult filled with magic and knives and weed.

Very strong image here; a sort of sheer acceptance and simultaneous denouncement of the insanity of facts in life. The capitalised Cult throws off the flow a bit, but 'magic and knives and weed' was great.

I went to that school over there...

Mmm. Bit iffy on those ellipses .

What matters to you besides that girl who doesn't love you?

Only in a poem of this kind can you get away with a sentence as literal as this. Could border on teenage angstiness, but I think it avoids it...just.

I never saw you stop and watch
The tears fall down my face when I saw
That my hopes were just my imagination gone astray.
So when those prolonged tears start rolling down your face
I'll be a long time gone.
Someday you'll wind up here with all the bums and the fugitives.
Let's hope that by then you’re as mad as me.
Insane is in babe, because sane is safe and boring.
Besides, who needs the slow life when death stalks closer every 60 seconds?

It's a bit of a slog to read here - maybe because of increasing line length, I don't know - but in general, I felt like I was about to lose interest. (Perhaps that was compounded by the fact you didn't get the fluency right and that's why.) I want to see more imagery here, interspersed with your conversational statements.

This is a mad house, and I'm its longest resident

Wonderful.

Throw down the pedestals, shut the satin curtains;
You're no king, and you'll soon realize you’re nothing without me.

And THAT is where this poem needs to end. Not at the ridiculously self-conscious audience-manipulative 'I hope I made you feel nostalgic.' These above lines are better than that; they summarise the poem far better than whatever you say in the finishing line. I really don't think you get across the idea of nostalgia that well during the poem (heh, perhaps that warrants some renaming, ja?) but it captures the internal conflict well.

---

Okay, here's what I have been bursting to tell you about till now. My favourite poems by Siken (which I hope you, too, will enjoy): I Had A Dream About You. Something nice and easy to start with, I think. Worth the entire read. Also - Straw House, Straw Dog. And: Little Beast.

Actually, my favourites change quite a bit - ask me again in a few days' time and I will have changed my mind.

Anyway, thanks for the read. PM me if you have any questions. Actually, PM me anyway - I'd love to discuss Siken's writing with you!


Navita

Hey written.

Navita touched on most of the points I would have talked about, but I'll ramble on a bit, in hopes of bringing something new to it.

Firstly, the tone you set early on is great, this weird mix of resolution and smugness and bringing up old wounds, that cuts but is very moderate, almost reasonable about it. That said, it falters a bit at times, in good part due to how your flow staggers.

As Navi said: with this type of raw, almost-prose-but-not-quite poetry, flow is of the utmost importance, and it's not as good as it could be here. The first line sets the mood well, but is very heavy. Second line would be a much better start, I believe, and while it still sounds a tiny bit off to me, it rolls off the mouth with a much harsher beat that fits the overall mood better. I find it's great up to

"I went to that school over there..."

It catches at

he's to safety as fishes are to land

which, while not exactly cliché, is a tad too obvious, if you will, and also seems too roundabout a way of going at it.

Then, after the slightly stale

Got beaten with their words so badly that I barely made it.

, you falter.

The tears fall down my face when I saw
That my hopes were just my imagination gone astray.
So when those prolonged tears start rolling down your face
I'll be a long time gone.

Overdone and trite. You'd been doing good straying from clichés before, this could have been done without. Watch out for the repetition, too, which here is only clumsy.

Someday you'll wind up here with all the bums and the fugitives.
Let's hope that by then you’re as mad as me.
Insane is in babe, because sane is safe and boring.
Besides, who needs the slow life when death stalks closer every 60 seconds?

This has promise, but it's very rough right now, and could be polished and neatened up, inasmuch as this sort of poem can be considered neat. You've got the idea, but you're wording it in ways that are a bit predictable. It ruins the emotion in this, and makes it drag on.

This is a mad house, and I'm its longest resident

Yes, this is good.

So it's as free as the freedom I will never see again.
You're wrong when you say that this is hell;
It's the only home I've ever known
And it's alright as long as I belong here and not where you are.

Again, ideas you could spin in interesting ways, even if they're a bit common (nothing new under the sun, after all) but the wording right now falls flat. Especially on that last line: it's long, it's clunky and, no offense, it reads like a line from a cheesy drama TV series.

Soon you'll be begging so low your nose will touch the ground.
What makes you think that by then I'll be able to forgive you?

Clunky as well. Try pronouncing those lines aloud. The syllables stumble over one another when I do. Maybe it's just me.

Throw down the pedestals, shut the satin curtains;

Back to the imagery. Yes. More, please?

Last line... has some punch, but not enough, and the capitalized N is very distracting to the reader.

So. To sum it up: I love your start. It's great. Packs a punch, hits in just the right ways, tone's just so. Sadly, it flops a bit pathetically after the tenth line and drags on from there, miring itself in angst and overdone images so that it loses most of its flavour and only has a couple lines where it pops back to life again. I say take the clichés out. Neaten up what you have. Raw feeling is good, but without the flow and with all those bland parts in the way it only gets lost. I had to force myself past the fifteenth line or so the first time around, which is too bad because I really wanted to love the whole of this.

The structure I don't mind so much, except when you've got those long lines dragging on after the shorter ones: they halt said flow, or redirect it in some wild direction we don't want it to go to, and it ruins the effect. That said, I second Navita in that the permanent first-letter cap at the beginning of each line can go. Should go, even, for it does distract and draw attention to the first word when the emphasis doesn't bring much to the reading.

I'll wind down now :P PM me if you want to discuss anything about what I said if I wasn't clear enough or missed the point entirely.

Jag