Peeling Dreams (edit)

Haven't been on here in ages.
An old poem of poem edited slightly for a competition, Just need to get some feedback, what could be done better etc.

Peeling Dreams

Lazy summer haze
infects the pathways and alleys of this town
a yearly disease, and our cue to come alive.

Photo-shoot sky, Backlit clouds
stumbling slovenly across the pastel blue
like unruly schoolchildren idling their days away
as we did, content with being
who the world told us we couldn’t, intoxicated on freedom
at least for these sun-bleached weeks
life’s haunting pressures were just children’s stories
designed to make us care
about our actions and consequence.
But we re-wrote the rules and revelled in the present.

Muggy August evenings
with midnight fire-lights
burning beacons casting faces
in soft orange, we would lay on our backs
gazing into the charcoal slab of night sky
and pretend we could touch the stars.

Too long in midday heat
gave way to sun-drunk blisters
peeling away, like the last days of summer
and our childish dreams gone with them
leaving skin curling like the edges of old photographs
revealing pale surfaces
clean slates
on which to etch our futures.

Heyaa

Sorry it's taken me a while to get here, my computer's been spazzing up a lot recently. I'm her now though, so it's all good! I'm not the best poetry reviewer at all, but I'll try and give you a half decent review.

Photo-shoot sky, backlit clouds
stumbling slovenly across the pastel blue
like unruly schoolchildren idling their days away
as we did, content with being
who the world told us we couldn’t, intoxicated on freedom.
At least for these sun-bleached weeks,
life’s haunting pressures were just children’s stories
designed to make us care
about our actions and consequences.
But we re-wrote the rules and revelled in the present.

This stanza was kind of confusing because of your grammar. I tried correcting it for you, but I wasn't certain whether I put all of the periods where you would have intended them to be.

Muggy August evenings
with midnight fire-lights.
Burning beacons casting faces
in soft orange, we would lay on our backs
gazing into the charcoal slab of night sky
and pretend we could touch the stars.

Too long in midday heat
gave way to sun-drunk blisters,
peeling away, Don't need this comma like the last days of summer
and our childish dreams gone with them,
leaving skin curling like the edges of old photographs,
revealing pale surfaces,
clean slates
on which to fetch our futures.

I'm not sure if fetch was the intended word here, but I assumed it was.


Overall

As a whole, this was quite a good poem, in my opinion. I adore the way you worded this poem. You varied your vocabulary very well and you used your words to describe things really well. By varying your words and vocabulary, the poem itself was more interesting and I didn't get bored while I was reading it. Well done for that. As for the idea of the poem itself, I rather liked it. It's a pretty original idea and I really love the way you portrayed it. It's clear that you know what you're doing when you write poetry. When it comes to your grammar and spelling, I felt that this was your weak point. Your spelling was okay, actually. There were a few typos, but nothing serious. It's your grammar that kind of lets down this piece of poetry. I'll go into a bit more detail about that later on though. Another thing that I really liked about this piece were your descriptions. They were strongly supported by your varied vocabulary. Your descriptions were vivid and certainly interesting. I think that descriptions in poetry are very important and I'm glad to see that you've used them effectively.

My main critique for this would certainly have to be the grammar. Don't get me wrong,it's not because of the fact that you should have done the grammar perfectly because everything has to be perfect. The reason your grammar was bugging me a bit is because it kind of made the poem harder to understand, due to a bit of a confusing flow. I wasn't 100% sure where sentences ended, for example. Don't get me wrong, the grammar in this isn't absolutely terrible and it certainly doesn't destroy the piece. It's just that I think the poem itself is really nice and descriptive, the confusing grammar kind of brings it down. If you fixed the grammar, this piece would be really lovely. I know that it sounds like I'm saying that your grammar is absolutely terrible and I've never seen worse, but please don't get that impression. It's just that it bugs me when a poem is a bit confusing. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that I think you need to tweak this here and there. Fix the grammar up, maybe tidy up the line structure here and there, and read over it to make sure that the poem makes complete sense and is easy to follow.

I don't actually have anything else to say... Sorry I'm not much help. Other than the grammar, I can't see anything noticeable that you need to fix here. So yeah...

Keep writing,

xoxo Skins

Lazy summer haze
infects the pathways and alleys of this town
a yearly disease, and our cue to come alive.

I really liked the idea of summer haze infecting pathways and alleys. However, I think this stanza needs some work grammar-wise. I can see why you left out punctuation, but because of the lack of punctuation, this doesn't read as smoothly as it could. I suggest rephrasing things slightly. One possibility: "with yearly disease, our cue to come alive."

As for the rest of the poem, again, I can see why you wanted to keep punctuation minimal, but it does mess with the flow of ideas and of the poem as a whole. Again, I suggest a bit of slight rephrasing to eliminate the need for as much punctuation as possible.

revealing pale surfaces
clean slates
on which to etch our futures.

You have a lovely theme with the tie-ins to photography going on, but I felt that in some places, you could have tied into this theme a bit more, especially in the lines quoted above. Rather than jumping to slates, which are associated with school, why not use the imagery of photography plates instead? You still have the etching effect, but this description is more connected with the rest of the poem compared to the slate jump.

Keeping your imagery consistent, or at the least visibly connected, makes it much easier to follow, and can really add a sense of wholeness to a poem.

Wow no one left anything out in their reviews There's not much left to say that hasn't been said, but one thing I'll mention is when you say;
"stumbling slovenly"
It isn't really very poetic, and to me the word "slovenly" sticks out, it just doesn't fit into the line. I think another word could be used there to make it a bit more fluent. I'm also not sure how you could not stumble in a slovenly way...slovenly is a synonym for sloppily and stumbling is, well, sloppy. A possible substitute is aimlessly? Just a suggestion! I like the way you referenced photography, with
"Photo-shoot sky, backlit clouds"
A word of warning-you describe everything in detail, and do a good job of making it seem fluent. But sometimes there can be too much detail and it just sounds crowded. I don't know if this is your regular style, but if it is you have to be careful and remember that you can only add so much before it sounds tedious to describe everything. This poem, however, is balanced quite well on that fine line between too much and too little

Hey Halycon -

Something I feel I must enlighten you about poetry: it's not just about clever word choice, although that can certainly help gain a reader's attention and interest.

As it stands, almost every image has something lifting it out of the mundane world of cliché and repetition that I usually see - so I was, admittedly, quite grateful for that - but at the same time, because there is no purpose for the vocabulary beyond the two-second aesthetic 'Look-at-me-I'm-a-poem!' factor, collectively, the images had no impact whatsoever.

There are places where I think you are much stronger in simplicity, and places where that fails miraculously. Let's take a look at this:

Lazy summer haze

Unfortunately, this is entirely uncharacteristic of what I said above. A cliché. It doesn't take a genius to rhyme laze with haze and it does little for the atmosphere itself. If you want to convey lethargy, there are better ways.

infects the pathways and alleys of this town
a yearly disease, and our cue to come alive.

Ah, see, here I thought you had potential. Infection. Summer like an infection. Now that is something one rarely sees. But the flow is not cooperating with the reader here. Something about word choice trying to be too showy - 'infects the pathways and alleys' - from an aural point of view, it just feels clunky. And I would love for you to elaborate on this 'yearly disease' - all we hear is one single mention of this, and then bam, it's gone. Nothing for the next three and only stanzas. Summer is described there in an entirely predictable fashion.

Also, 'our cue to come alive' - a few notes. (1) I much preferred the simplicity of this to anything else you've just written, (2) it does not at all fit well with the idea of a disease - I mean, if summer is a disease, then why is it a cue to come alive? and (3) I want to see an individual character connection established early on in the poem, as opposed the rather vague 'our'. If you're going to have an entire poem devoted to summer, you might as well make something about it interesting for the reader on a personal level. Otherwise, it's a straight description of 'this-is-summer-and-this-is-what-happens-during-summer' without much character-drive. A better poem manages to connect with the reader even while using the medium of such inanimate things as seasons and the environment. Work on this.

Photo-shoot sky, Backlit clouds
stumbling slovenly across the pastel blue
like unruly schoolchildren idling their days away

Pretty certain that capitalisation was unintended. But the descriptions here are makeup on nothing. They are words that are reasonably interesting, strung together with no regard for flow or balance, and trying to make up for the fact that there is little purpose to writing this beyond putting pen to paper. Your adjectives and adverbs are signalling this to me, actually; when one does not know the correct noun/verb to slot in, they rely on their adjectives/adverbs to make things tastier. 'Slovenly', 'pastel' and 'unruly' are doing nothing other than waving about desperately.

content with being
who the world told us we couldn’t, intoxicated on freedom
at least for these sun-bleached weeks
life’s haunting pressures were just children’s stories
designed to make us care
about our actions and consequence.
But we re-wrote the rules and revelled in the present.

And here, a near-imagery-less section, that also had potential. Ruined by such things as 'sun-bleached,' 'children's stories' and the pretentiousness of 'actions and consequence / But we re-wrote the rules and revelled in the present' - however, I think with some rephrasing, this could work. You mentioned summer as a disease before. Here you hint at intoxication. These are more intriguing ideas, I'd say, since they have a stronger point of difference than anything else you say or will say in the poem. Summer is happy, the cliché month; you here had the opportunity to use the disease/intoxication/madness motif to your advantage as a recurrent metaphor, of sorts, an axis around which every description could revolve. And instead, the reader gets

Muggy August evenings
with midnight fire-lights
burning beacons casting faces
in soft orange, we would lay on our backs
gazing into the charcoal slab of night sky
and pretend we could touch the stars.

this. A love theme. A hodgepodge of themes, each of which is given no more weight than any other, since it is devoted at most a few random words. You would be so much more powerful in consistency, not like this, as you are now, in haphazardness and tossing about words for the sake of it. Write several different versions of the same poem, from scratch, if you like and you'll find what you were wanting to write about in the first place - the single idea, metaphor. Build the architecture of the poem around that. This is a string of paperclips at the moment - colourful, sometimes awkwardly hashed together, disconnected on a purely subconscious level.

Too long in midday heat
gave way to sun-drunk blisters
peeling away, like the last days of summer
and our childish dreams gone with them
leaving skin curling like the edges of old photographs
revealing pale surfaces
clean slates
on which to etch our futures.

What is it that you want to leave the reader with? Peeling dreams - peeling blisters, last days of summer, nostalgia, loss of innocence. Short, fragmented themes that are given hardly any weight in the other stanzas. The childhood-theme wasn't conducted nearly as well - 'life's haunting pressures were just children's stories' (really? were they? are they not adults' stories?) 'actions and consequence' (too pompous for a childhood recollection with absolutely no element of nostalgia), 'pretend we could touch the stars' (getting all too touchy-feely love-ish here; this stanza has grown up and walked out the door already), 'clean slates onto which we etch our future' (but you've just said that skin is 'curling'! (i.e. growing old) - so how can there be a clean slate? surely it gets dirtier?).

Fraught with inconsistency, however much potential individual parts might have had. You've got your word variety sorted - now sit down and think about letting the words mean something, and mean it collectively and not sporadically.

Navita