Addicts

Haven't written anything in a while so this is kind of a return for me and its pretty much a splish-splash of emotion so don't be afraid to tear it apart.


The day we met
I was self conscious of my own stereotype
like jigsaw piece forced into the wrong place
awkward, a cheap copy
within the surrounding black jackets and tight jeans
and you smiled; innocent, ordinary
smiling at me
reaching out across grit and crunch
of pub band guitars,
the sounds of a fleeting dream mixed with the jewellery of cheap glow sticks
our wrists adorned with the tacky light of rundown bars.
in a pretence
but you made me feel real.

Early summer days
spent within the notches of abandoned hospital fields
I saw you cry, rolled up sleeved crinkling
around elbows like sloughed skin
revealing delicate pale, marked with red
neat and angry lines, the rungs of a ladder
that sadness left propped up against your forearm
stripes, like a warning sign within a cry for help
but I whispered in your ear things that wouldn’t seem true.
To you at least

I was infected, trawling the streets
with your hand cupped in mine, swinging arms
feigning friendly motion, and singing trivial things
like the writing on billboards and high street adverts
anything that made you laugh I suppose, tinkling,
touched with the raw throat of cigarette smoke
I was addicted to that sound as much as you were to the nicotine.

Where we met, outside,
was the last time I really saw you
lighting up, drawing back, as we gave our farewells
and later, lighting me up, inside out
Just a roll of tobacco between your lips
(a passing pleasure)
burning down to a cinder, asphyxiating
like a deprived addict
because your laughter
wasn’t mine anymore.

I love this. It's very descriptive and personal, and I can see everything. You describe the emotion really well, and I especially like the way you ended it. I don't actually have anything to criticise about it, I just love the style it's written in. Sorry I couldn't be more helpful, I just like it so much!

The entire first stanza made me go "Blah." It was dull, bland, and repetitive. Most of the imagery was common and vague, with the exception of glowsticks as "tacky light of rundown bars". That was actually pretty good. In any case, other than that, the entire stanza felt bland and done-before. There was no unique perspective on the situation, nor vivid imagery to hold my interest. In addition, the capitalization of "Self" was a major turn off to me; I felt like you were placing far too much importance upon this "Self", especially since the stanza was more about the bar and "you" than the narrator. There was also no real connection between the first stanza and the rest of the poem.

The imagery in the second stanza though was absolutely lovely. The rest of the poem's was decent, and I liked particularly how you tied the third stanza together with that last line.

I suggest cutting out the first stanza entirely. It serves no real purpose and almost turned me away from this poem.

Hey Halycon -

You teeter between halfway decent imagery and clichés that will turn away any reader in disgust. Also - your structure is too clean-cut. Each paragraph is an entity of itself and not a part of a whole, not a webbed continuation but a linear one that really has no connection with what came before save a few worthless details.

The day we met
I was self conscious of my own stereotype

This cliché is hard to stomach. It's boring and it's the worst kind of first line, 'the day we met'. Start with something fresher instead of turning away the reader from the poem so early on.

like jigsaw piece forced into the wrong place
awkward, a cheap copy

Getting much better here. This is something we don't see too often - the feeling of dislocation and not fitting in juxtaposed with jigsaws. Somewhat juvenile, that association, but it's better than the beginning at any rate.

And you blew it completely in the following line:

within the surrounding black jackets and tight jeans
and you smiled; innocent, ordinary
smiling at me

Black jackets and tight jeans. Ho hum. A cheesy, bare-faced smile. Why not continue with the jigsaw metaphor? Or integrate some feeling of addiction in here, rather than boring us with cliché upon cliché? I see addiction as something very interesting to explore - the obsessiveness of it, the motif of being one-eyed (single viewed; perspective is tunnel-visioned; obsessive), the rise and fall of desire, the frustration and satisfaction of the self - be it through love or drugs or whatever.

reaching out across grit and crunch
of pub band guitars,
the sounds of a fleeting dream mixed with the jewellery of cheap glow sticks
our wrists adorned with the tacky light of rundown bars.
in a pretence

Yes. Despite no integration of an overarching theme here - like that suggested above - this is great. You're overdoing your description, but you're overdoing it in a halfway interesting manner - the vocabulary. And you know what else lifted this up? The admission of the 'pretence'. That whole string of adjectives and sarcastically bitter imagery was a pretence. The irony is really something.

And there was potential for this 'pretence' idea to be continued throughout as well. The pretence that addiction is - not a true satisfaction of desire, but a supposed one. The pretend-game of falling in love with the idea of falling in love. The pretence of convincing oneself that it's not an addiction.

But you didn't expand on it at all, which meant your poem fell down in flames, bridges halfway constructed and left incomplete. You need to create more here, architecturally, rather than leaving the reader with one-word suggestions and moving on to the next idea so quickly - currently, each little idea has hardly any impact on its own, since it's not given space and time enough to develop; and the ideas have no collective impact, either, since they're not linked up.

but you made me feel real.

And you just tossed out any credibility you'd gained as a poet in the intentional irony of before, of the word 'pretence'. This is cheap, another cliché, hence unreal. A pretence not even disguised as one that pokes fun at itself.

Early summer days

Any point to this? What significance does summer have? I don't care for the line.

spent within the notches of abandoned hospital fields
I saw you cry, rolled up sleeved crinkling
around elbows like sloughed skin
revealing delicate pale, marked with red

Like I said, teetering between rubbish and some good description. No complaints for this above part, other than a blatant linearity to everything else. Web it more; find an underlying motif/metaphor/image and revolve the imagery around that, rather than a dot-to-dot line.

neat and angry lines

I don't see how lines can be neat and angry at once. And it's superfluous anyway - all you need to say is 'sloughed skin' and 'marked with red' to get across the idea of anger. Remove it.

the rungs of a ladder
that sadness left propped up against your forearm
stripes, like a warning sign within a cry for help
but I whispered in your ear things that wouldn’t seem true.

Rungs of a ladder - fine. Sadness - fine. Repetition of crying - not fine. The transition from second to third line makes no sense. And 'things that wouldn't seem true' is unecessarily roundabout. Sharpen it.

To you at least

No. You need to say it in the previous line than this hasty tack-on.

I was infected, trawling the streets
with your hand cupped in mine, swinging arms
feigning friendly motion, and singing trivial things
like the writing on billboards and high street adverts
anything that made you laugh I suppose, tinkling,
touched with the raw throat of cigarette smoke
I was addicted to that sound as much as you were to the nicotine.

Given up on a line-by-line, since I'll be repeating it. The first three lines are boringly lovey-dovey. The third line was interesting and the fourth threw that out the window again. 'Raw throat of cigarette smoke' was a powerful image, however; but again, it was lost in the mundaneness of the following line, where you attempt to summarise the whole point of the poem in one go, not trusting the reader to make the association themself. And we can't do that anyway, due to general sloppiness of the preceding stanzas. You need to show us that love is as addictive as physical, material things like cigarettes. Don't tell us. No one likes it slapped in their face.

Where we met, outside,
was the last time I really saw you
lighting up, drawing back, as we gave our farewells
and later, lighting me up, inside out
Just a roll of tobacco between your lips

Some rephrasing needed here - firstly to make it less cheesy in the 'where we met' part and secondly to make the 'light up' / 'light me up' less messily worded.

(a passing pleasure)
burning down to a cinder, asphyxiating

This is where it should end. What follows counts for nothing.

Good luck with edits.


Navita