The Bloodless, Floundering Vampire of Me-ville

This is from an assignment I had in my acting class, whose instructions were to write a character analysis of myself, using the following questions as an outline:

Who am I? What time is it? What surrounds me? What are the given circumstances? What are my relationships? What do I want? What is in my way? What do I do to get what I want?

_____

I am human before I am anything else.
Beautiful, intricate, deep, captivating, inexplicable,
compassionate, loving, trusting, unrelenting,
inconsistent, feeble, rebellious, corrupt, impressionable,
egotistical, opportunistic, hedonistic,
capricious, and mortal.
Then I am names and titles,
Eva, sister, daughter, granddaughter, friend,
Havala, listener, wonderer, poet, pianist,
Wendybird, artist, child.
Within and throughout I am a bloodless, floundering vampire,
drinking in deep, thick emotions,
sucking pain from the pumping, bloodred hearts of
friends, sisters, strangers, characters,
people. Real or unreal.
Searching for something to sustain me,
knowing life is beautiful, necessary,
needing to stay awake, alive,
always, always searching for a reason.

_____

It is Noon exactly,
on the twenty-ninth of September,
in the two-thousand and tenth year of our Lord.
Like all other times,
it is a time of political strife,
when mercurial citizens find intolerable our nation’s leader,
who, not two years ago, was being praised.
It is a time of economic crisis,
prayer chains thick with pleas for employment,
businesses cutting breadwinners despite diligence,
schools cutting programs despite importance,
limbs being severed to keep the body standing.
It is a low time for the wide world,
and a low time for mine.
A time of transition and change,
coping, growing, accepting.
A time of doubting and contemplating,
asking, wondering, searching, pleading, thinking.
It is a time of conflicting desires,
to be a child,
running, laughing, playing, imagining;
to be a daughter,
loving, obeying, talking, listening;
to be a person all my own,
experiencing, rebelling, learning, becoming.

_____

I am surrounded by things of no consequence.
Table, bag, bottle, tissue, book, binder, paper, pencil,
carpeted floor, vented ceiling.
A window before me,
and people behind,
whispering, working, shuffling, laughing,
coming, leaving, staying, gone.
I am surrounded by autumnal tokens,
scorching red, burning orange, leaves falling, tumbling;
bitter wind promenading through the trees,
breathing coal-fire redolence.
I am surround by grey, meandering clouds,
grey, meandering people,
always people, always everywhere,
everyone coming and going and being.
I am within four walls, within one town, county, state, country,
continent, world, earth, sky, solar system, galaxy,
universe: eternal, infinite.

_____

The circumstances begin with my fingers,
quick whisper click across the alphabet buttons,
accomplishing the required for the class, for the grade,
for myself. An exploration of myself.
The circumstances pan out to everything,
quick whisper clicking for the class,
classing for the credit,
crediting for the degree
degreeing for the job,
jobbing for the money,
moneying for the life,
living for -
what?

_____

What I write becomes important when I can put Me within it.
The quick whisper clicks of now are just as much for me
as they are for the class, credit, degree, job, money, life.
I write to understand myself,
I listen to understand friends, family, strangers;
I learn, laugh, cry, ask, watch, read, pray to understand the world.
All relationships of any caliber are about understanding
someone, something.

_____

To want is to have confidence.
With an ill-established self one must become confident
in something or someone else altogether.
I place confidence in society, and trust in what is expected of me,
the same way in which I place confidence in my family.
According to all their established rules,
I should want good grades, an impressive degree,
an enjoyable and well-paid job.
These are the things I want which are wanted for me.
What I want for myself
is a question rife with complications.
I want to be changed without changing,
to be skinnier, look prettier, speak wittier,
be tougher, be quieter, be louder, be meeker.
I want to be more faithful, independent, strong, mature,
rebellious, knowledgable, compassionate, likable, popular, unique.
I want to lead, motivate, inspire.
I want to be an example of humility,
I want my humility to be recognized and admired.
I want to be admired, loved, envied, imitated, quoted,
and yet I want to remain the same.

_____

This is what stands in my way,
the impossibility of the coexistence of everything I want.
This is what stands in my way:
the inability of knowing, recognizing, deciding what I want.

_____

There is nothing I can do to make real an impossibility.
No one will ever have what they want,
when everyone always wants perfection,
everyone, in every place on earth, desires to be without fault.
We are all hopeless romantics,
waiting, thinking, praying, hoping, dreaming,
always for something we know is unreal,
cannot exist.
There is no perfection in this world,
only the ability to strive.

Hello there, my dear. I, ArticulateOverlord, shall be your reviewer today. I hope you take no offense at any issues I point out; I am merely trying to help.

Beautiful, intricate, deep, captivating, inexplicable,
compassionate, loving, trusting, unrelenting,
inconsistent, feeble, rebellious, corrupt, impressionable,
egotistical, opportunistic, hedonistic,
capricious, and mortal.

This, my dear, is what I like to call an adjective flood. It appears to be descriptive, inundating the reader with descriptive words, however the truth is quite otherwise. Each of these words represent abstract concepts, and abstract concepts piled upon more abstractions does not a vivid nor comprehensive description make. Rather, it becomes a tangle of nonsense, pretty wording without any meaning.

I suggest that you ground these abstractions into concrete images your readers can envision. Show us what sort of beauty you hold and to what extent it defines you. In what ways are you rebellious, impressionable, inconsistent? Give examples, weave in anecdotes, and do not rely upon abstractions. Doing so distances this poem from your readers and yourself as abstractions are meant to apply to generalities rather than specifics.

This reliance upon adjectives pervades the entire poem and so dilutes the impact and individuality a poem like this could have.

Within and throughout I am a bloodless, floundering vampire,

This line came quite out of nowhere, my dear, and is a sharp contrast to the first line of the poem. Also, considering that the bulk of the first stanza had been describing how you were human, it strikes me as a bit counter-intuitive to suddenly declare that you are something other than human. In addition, declaring that you are a vampire, a wholly overused metaphor, without contributing anything new to the idea, and rather treading straight along the well-worn path of cliche, shunts this poem into the rather unfortunate class of "unoriginal".

I suggest that you find a less common way of portraying your parasitic nature. Turning to the animal kingdom for inspiration is always a viable option, and there are numerous parasites that you could associate yourself with. For instance, if you wish for the glamour associated with vampires, you could go with the parasitic butterfly Maculinea alcon which tricks ants into feeding its larvae at the cost of the ants' own brood.

By using less common imageries to portray parasitism, your poem is lent a greater air of originality and uniqueness. I encourage you to branch out and uncover such uncommon imageries.

Your second stanza suffers from many of the same issues as the first, with the addition of making me wonder why the first half is relevant. You answer the questions of time and circumstance, but that is all. There is no connection to how these things shape you as an individual. Again, you fall into the pit trap of generalities over specifics. This is a poem about you as an individual, non? Then show how everything you perceive is colored by your perception. Show how each of these perceptions shape and alter your being and future perceptions. Reveal to us the dynamic between your nature and the environment's nurture.

At the moment, your poem is sorely lacking in this regard.

The third stanza is much of the same, this time compounded by the conundrum: if these are all things of such little consequence, why do you spend so much time detailing them? You also fail to show the reader why these things are of such little consequence, which is a shame. Out of all the stanzas thus far, this one could have been the most intriguing. Instead, it reads as pseudophilosophical.

I suggest exploring why these things are so inconsequential. Not only will it add more intellectual depth to your poem, but it will reveal more of your inner psyche, which in turn will color the poem with the individuality of your perception.

The fourth stanza describes this poem perfectly to my mind: you wrote this solely for a grade. This, quite frankly, shows. I feel a bit cheated of my time in that I spent so much effort reviewing this as I went, only to discover that it was written for a grade and nothing more. I wonder why you posted this here, whether you really intend to take my suggestions to heart and improve.

I know you stated at the start that you wrote this for an assignment, but I had hopes that in writing the assignment, you found yourself creating something more, and that you were looking for feedback in hopes of refining that something more. It seems not, if the fourth stanza is any indication.

But then the fifth stanza revitalizes my hopes that you did find something more in writing this, that there is hope for this poem yet. Of all the stanzas, the fifth rings to me as most the sincere and genuine. It is bogged down by nonspecifics, by generalities, but if you were to expand upon this stanza, breathe in life by weaving in specifics and anecdotes, I can see the fifth stanza as becoming the strongest of them all.

The sixth and seventh stanzas, however, fall staunchly into the realm of pretentiousness. All the sincerity of the fifth has been lost beneath such pseudophilosophistry as "To want is to have confidence." Poetry, to be truly meaningful, requires sincerity and a genuineness of intention in writing that this poem, and these stanzas in particular, lack overall. And it is a shame. The lack of grounding in the tangible also strikes again and makes these stanzas unappreciable.

I suggest you break down the sixth stanza to its simplest, to its essence. From there, frame these core ideas, enhance them, but do not overpower them with tawdry intellectualisms for they lack sincerity. In addition, for both stanzas, expand upon the core ideas with specific examples and anecdotes; they will personalize this poem and mark it as uniquely yours, a mark which is sorely missing.

In the final stanza, you have veered so totally away from yourself, I wonder what relation this last stanza has to the rest of the poem. You also generalize and project your own views upon everyone, which is quite dangerous. By doing so, you risk alienating readers, such as myself, who disagree with you. This poem is about you; I suggest you keep it about you and not about making a "profound" statement about all of human existence.

Overall, the only reason I bothered to finish writing this review was because I had invested so much time into it. This poem screams uninspired and insincere, that it was written for points and no other reason. Honestly, I wonder why you posted it here.

That said, I do hope that these issues I have pointed out help you with your poetry in the future. I also hope that the next poem you post here is not written for a school assignment. I would like to see some of the poetry you have written simply for the sake of writing and sharing poetry as you had a few pieces of imagery scattered about that looked particularly promising. I would not like to see any more poetry of yours that has been drowned in the "I need a good grade" mentality that pervades this entire piece.

Good day.