Freeze

In the cold, the aurora of life vanishes
like when grisly fog ensnares the horizon.
In the marble glow, apathy lulls you to sleep;
before long, your eidolon moves for you.

You imagine your half-life, naked in a terminal ward
when you know that your purpose is out of breath.
The hollow, jagged fingers of the reaper grip the wrist.
He leads you into the dark until you forget how to see.

Stinging, the hoarfrost sticks to the soles of your feet,
and numbing fire swells inside your constricted veins.
Wicked whispers enchant you and you awake among
dying trees, once again alive in that tundra.

As you dream of death, the northern lights taunt you;
the stars watch and sing a dirge as you freeze.
A thousand numbing viper bites cover your toes,
but you trudge toward the moon until you sleep.

-- -- --

Spoiler

AN: Feel more than free to give feedback. It's still a work in progress, but I haven't posted something in a tiny while; I thought now was a good time. I'd particularly like feedback in the area of flow.

So, I'm going to give a really lame review. Sorry in advance.

I really liked this piece- the language was excellent, and the word selection was nice. The imagery was strong, though I felt like it could have been a little bit newer in some parts. In others, it was excellent. The flow was nice and smooth, which isn't common (in my experience anyways) in pieces with longer lines. At one I stopped reading and actually admired how uninterrupted it was. So great job on that.

Overall, really great piece- I think that if you extended on it a bit, it might be a bit better. As it is, there isn't the best concluding tone. But you mentioned something about that so... yeah.
Great job.


-Coral-

This was a really interesting piece. The way it played out was almost stream-of-consciousness, but it was far more poetic than any SOC piece I've ever seen. The combination of following a progression of thought, but still carefully picking your words gave the poem a really unique feel.
The flow was excellent. I had to read the poem through once to get the rhythm down before I could truly appreciate how nicely the piece flows.
I agree with Persephoneia that the ending doesn't really feel like an end. I would love to see this poem added to with a conclusion that really brings together everything you're trying to say here.

Lumi, love, here I am as requested. First, allow my to sharpen my talons (though filing them down would be a bit more practical considering they're long enough to be hindering my typing...).

As I already told you in chat, I do wonder at the title. Cold-induced ulcers are rather difficult to render poetically, and I really don't see how they relate to the rest of the poem, unless you were coming from the often-mistaken-as-frostbite angle, in which case, I think simple frostbite would be more appropriate. Chilblains make me think of cranky old women with their bloated feet propped up by the fireside, complaining about how things are different than what they used to be, and that life used to be better when children still respected their elders. So I believe there is a rather large disparity in tone between the title and the rest of the poem.

The cold feels like a hue of reality has vanished,

This line made me physically wince. You can do much better, Lumi. I know you can. As it stands, this is altogether too wordy and bland. How does the cold feel like a hue? Warmth is to cold as hue is to...? There is no clear connection between a hue and it's opposite, and so the analogy falls apart.

Going back to wordiness, the impression is mostly due to the blandness of the words used. All of them are common. None of them are used particularly creatively. Altogether, they combine to form a rather icky looking sludge of a first line.

One suggestion: The warm hue of reality has vanished. There is only cold.

Though it could definitely use more tweaking, the connection between warmth and hue is made clearer. The brevity and terseness created by the use of full stops lends a bleakness to the opening line that is missing the the blandness of the current version.

like when grisly fog subdues the sun and you lose your horizon.

Grisly fog. Now that's some of the imagery I was hoping for. Unfortunately, the rest of the line patters off into mediocrity by employing well-worn imagery. Why don't you try portraying how the grisly fog subdues the sun?

That lackluster emotion, that pointlessness, it’s a terrible apprehension.

Eurgh. Too blatant. And at the same time, too vague. Cut it.

Before long, your eidolon moves for you.

This line confused me. Do you mean eidolon the phantom/apparition, or the ideal, or a play on both? In any case, it's not really working, and I can't put my finger on why.

I relate the feeling to what I imagine terminal life must evoke
when you know that your purpose is out of breath;

I get the terminal illness allusion (not that it's really an allusion considering how obvious it is), but this line just reads too oddly. Again, it's partly due to wordiness. Try to keep it brief, terse. The main atmosphere of this poem is coldness. As coldness is associated with sparseness, keeping your language as sparse and spartan as possible will only enhance this atmosphere.

My suggestion: I imagine a terminal life. It evokes in me that feeling
of knowing your purpose is out of breath;

and the waxy, jagged fingers of that familiar beast grip the wrist.

Rather than "and", I would suggest either "as" or omitting the "and" entirely. It gives this line a bit more immediacy and increases the tension.

He leads you into the dark until you forget how to see.

Bland, but I can't think of any way to improve upon it.

You begin to miss the light, really, but if you can’t remember
what happiness felt like, you don’t miss it.

These lines seem to contradict themselves, especially when coupled with the last line of the previous stanza. You've forgotten how to see, so you've forgotten what light is? Or is it just that you've forgotten how to see the light? In which case, does light equate to happiness, in which case you don't really miss the light? And if not, how does the light and happiness relate to one another?

You see my confusion? @_@

The only comfort, your only relief, is the reminder
that if you’re lucky, that pain will be transient.

Meh. There's no real set up for this, so I'm feeling pretty apathetic to these lines. All I can say is that they're an ending. If, however, you were to allude to numbness being caused by the continuous cold, I can see these lines being more powerful as an ending. Right now though, they're meh.

I hope you're satisfied, Lumi, love, and that the talons didn't scratch too deeply (or lightly).

Thanks for the reviews so far, guys! Edit #5 had some pretty heavy changes in it, so feel free to read and tell me what you think. It's further along on its path to being decent, at least. I just need to sharpen the cohesion between stanzas a bit.

Particular thanks to you, Kyll, for making some great points. And your talons aren't /that/ sharp.

Interesting Lumi, very interesting, I'm not sure how to begin this review, so I shall begin with what I worked out, it's about someone dying or experiencing death in a dream and the slow eventual descent into hell or the underworld. I have to say I like this, you have great word choice and beautiful evocative imagery to boot, but it seems lacking and as of now trying to work out what's wrong, I shall read again.

I think I've worked out what missing, it seems incomplete, it sounds splendid don't mistake that, but I feel you should have another stanza between the second and third. As of now just seems slightly incomplete like you moved too quickly to another topic without fully addressing the one above, and knowing you I feel you could easily do so.

Overall, other than that small nitpick I like it, I just have to say though, as far as your work goes this isn't one of your better pieces, it's not the weakest but it isn't the best, it's just sorta got major potential, but never quite reaches that zenith.

Hope this helps.

Hi, I like this poem. You use very nice imagery, good use of language and vocabulary although I still think there's some emotion missing, but that's just me.

I really liked the way you have used the imagery used in here:

Stinging, the hoarfrost sticks to the soles of your feet,
and numbing fire swells inside your constricted veins.
Wicked whispers enchant you and you awake among
dying trees, once again alive in that tundra.

I feel the last stanza is quite vague:

As you dream of death, the northern lights taunt you;
the stars watch and sing a dirge as you freeze.
A thousand numbing viper bites cover your toes,
but you trudge toward the moon until you sleep.

I didn't really understand what you meant with the last two lines.


I really liked this stanza:

You imagine your half-life, naked in a terminal ward
when you know that your purpose is out of breath.
The hollow, jagged fingers of the reaper grip the wrist.
He leads you into the dark until you forget how to see.

It's nice, well structured, good language and I can feel some emotion.

Overall good poem, keep writing

Evening, Lumi.

Before I get into the heart of the review, thanks for entering my contest! And congratulations, again, on placing third. This was well-deserving of the title. Now.

I'll start with the flow. To be honest, this was where this poem hit its biggest snag. The line breaks were, for lack of a better word, clumsy, and predictable. The syllabic pattern (nearly all of your lines possessed about ten to twelve syllables) made me think at first that this was going to have some sort of a rhyme scheme, and when it didn't, it kind of caught me off-balance. Of course, that was just a small part of the problem. This could be connected partly with your lines break locations, or it could be more related to how you structured your sentences, but the majority of the lines in this poem seem like they were meant to be looked at individually, and not in the context of the rest of the poem. It's like the lines don't connect with each other, if you understand my meaning. There are some places in the poem where it appears you tried form a stronger bond, but these are so sparse that the only thing they are able to accomplish is their sounding utterly strange. For example:

You imagine your half-life, naked in a terminal ward
when you know that your purpose is out of breath.
The hollow, jagged fingers of the reaper grip the wrist.
He leads you into the dark until you forget how to see.

You see? The lines do not flow smoothly into each other, like they should. Instead, they just kind of stumble into each other. This stanza is the worst in that respect, but it's noticeable throughout the piece.

Of course, there is a reason why you did so well in the contest, and that's what I'll be talking about next. The imagery, the actual content of this poem, was spectacular. Though you did overdo it a bit at times with the adjectives, I could really feel exactly what the words were meant to portray. These two lines:

Wicked whispers enchant you and you awake among
dying trees, once again alive in that tundra.

...were beautiful. Not sure exactly what I'm supposed to be visualizing, but I can definitely grasp their sentimental essence.

Once again, thanks for entering. I hope this review was helpful! PM me if you have any questions or comments regarding this review. Keep writing!

-Kafka