The Waiting Room

You hate the waiting room. You are surrounded by sick children. They are everywhere you turn. You sit waiting for your name, praying it will be soon. Every time those sick children cough in your direction, you squirm. You know germs, bacteria, and viruses wait here as well. You hear crying and whining. You see children fighting over diseased infected toys. You want this to be over. You want the child next to you to stop picking his nose. You want the nurse to just call your name. You walk over to her thinking of ways to be next. You ran different scenarios throughout your mind. When you’re at the desk you play every game in the book. One of your games included flirting with the nurse. Nothing works. You return to your seat. You’re stuck in the waiting room.

Hi paperhearts, welcome to YWS!

Re: your poem. I like the choice of genre - prose poems are really fun to read, but they don't seem to be very popular for some reason. I could definitely identify with the topic, too; I hate waiting rooms. There were a couple of things I thought you could fix, though. Firstly, you start almost every sentence with "You" and after a while it does get kind of tiresome. Maybe you could experiment with mixing it up a little. Also, a lot of this poem "tells" the reader how the narrator feels rather than showing - something you don't want to do in most other circumstances, but which is particularly important when you're using the second person. When you use "you" you're talking about the reader, and they don't always appreciate being told how they're feeling. Your best bet would be to expand a little more. Try describing how and why they're feeling the way they are instead. For example, instead of "You want this to be over," try something like, "You will the door to open, the doctor to call your name." You need to trust your readers to understand the unspoken subtext. We're smarter than you think Kudos on picking a tricky voice to work with, though!

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
~bubbles

Hey I'm Amie and I'll be reviewing for you today.

Overall, I enjoyed this. You've picked out some wonderful & recognizable moments, which help the reader to relate. I particularly enjoyed the line...

You want the child next to you to stop picking his nose

Because of course we've all witnessed that particular scenario! It also made me laugh a little

I'm wondering whether you've experimented at all with the perspective it's told from; I'm not entirely sure if second person is working because it's difficult for you to describe feelings in a bit more detail because, like the reviewer before me said, the reader won't appreciate it. I also agree about the showing and telling in this - something to bear in mind.

Great poem

Hey paper,

Maybe it's just me, but I define poetry in great part by how it flows when I read it--how the words come out of your mouth, how smoothly they go. Right now, this piece falls rather short: in part it's the repetitive sentence stucture (like bubblewrapped said, the constant "You [verb] [blahblah]" gets very tedious, and makes the whole thing very stilted), but also the stiffness of the style: the short sentences (which, when taken on their own, don't stand out in any way--there's no image here that really strikes my imagination, or helps me picture that specific waiting room, that exact moment, etc), the lack of depth in what you give us--it's all pretty much surface thoughts, with all we really end up knowing about this person is that (s)he is really bored and doesn't want to be there. Nothing else to connect to, nothing to snag at the attention and make it stay on.

I think you've got a decent start, a base to build on--but it's still just that: a foundation. Now you need some walls :P

I admire that you weren't scared to experiment in the creation of this poem, but I'm not entirely sure that the use of second person was working for me. I think it would be more effective had it been told in third person. As well as this, I'm not sure if the choppiness of this piece was intentional, and I found it annoying because it didn't flow too well. At first, I thought you'd accidentally forgotten to press the enter key between each line because of the short sentences, but I think if that was your intention, you could make the style work if different language was applied.
Overall a good poem, and I really enjoyed the part about the child and the message of the poem overall. It painted a good picture and I could empathise with the speaker.

Hey there

This was really, really ambitious. Second person, prose-y poem style, and interesting subject matter. While I admire how you tackle all of these things, I don't know if they all worked well. The second person bit was pretty nice, but I think there's room for improvement. I didn't really enjoy the prose-y style, but that's just a personal thing, so disregard that. I do like that you tried it, though. c: I think my only true nitpick is the telling versus showing, which the other reviewers mentioned. Don't tell us how the subject feels, we can figure that out through actions and showing. Other than that, this was really good!

Keep Writing!
Leslie