Encore

Spoiler

You know what to do.
OH, and girl-who-supplies-my-pigeons.... please don't hunt me down. My creativity is dead, you see. kthxbai.

even you couldn't extend your palms - not with planets
carefully placed in single file lines, not even with a pen
in hand, a pen to my chest, wriggling ropes of ink
sifting through my veins like silver eels in the weeds,
slithering sickly through the arteries and even
you couldn't keep the canine satisfied as she waited,
taunting my fingers as they relaxed against the table
with magnets in my bones, begging through the marrow
for a schrade to grace her calluses and spill into the grain,
throughout the floorboards and to the window pane.

it's starting to set in. earlier this morning, or maybe
maybe it was yesterday morning when I swallowed it whole
and waited for it to singe my skin from my insides to my outs;
it started hurting, it tears and it's burning in my lungs now
like cold steel at penpoint before you pull the trigger 'cause
this one didn't slide as easily as my pride did - this one can't
slide without stripping me of my vocals and breath and I and--
you don't feel the gates open, you don't feel this rushing in;

you can't stop a silver bullet like you used to and it
pains me to think I used to rely on you - maybe I still do
when they speak of the devil and you don't, when they pass
by the light and you don't... silence calls for an encore
in a million different voices (all of which sound the same)
as you stand there, palms to the sky to stop this gravity

why won't you come here to stop this from falling
back to last winter, back, back to last autumn, oh
August, have mercy. please, August, have mercy.



.

Hiyya, Written here, or Stone - as some call me.
I'm here to review this piece of work that you've called Encore.

So, I'm a little short on time at the moment but I can give you a review that may or may not help you improve this poem.
First things first, when reading it I had some trouble following the thick stanzas, when I write poetry I normally try to keep the stanzas at a four line maximum and they normall have sense for just those four lines the next lines move onto something a bit different like:

Spoiler

Pain.
Something about pain.
Description of feelings.
End of pain.

How to deal with pain.
Something about dealing with pain.
Description of feelings.
End of dealing.

This is just a quick demonstration.

I'm probably explaining this all wrong, but trust me I'm trying. O.O
Maybe you shouldn't exactly trust me on this one ^ but believe me it's harder to explain than you'd think.

Well, I'd also like to say that you're poem is like three giant run-on sentences. There isn't a period until the first three words on the - what I think is - the second stanza. So, what you should do is break it up - smaller stanzas - quicker phrases.

Spoiler

The simple beauty of love.
So fleeting and elusive to the touch.
Who else has experienced such a feeling?
I doubt it has become any more lucid than before.

So make the sentences short, and sweet - we don't want some huge ginormous sentences that take up a whole half a page just to say something as simple as - what is love?

Alright, that's mostly all I've got to say well that and the whole - Encore - as a title just doesn't seem to go with the poem - that also could just be me.

- Hope I helped a little bit.
-Stone.

Consider this an IOU. A critique will appear eventually.

Hey,

This is reaaaaaally good. This is the type of poetry that I sit down for hours trying to write. One thing that bothered me was the lack of capitalization. At some points, it made sense, was even good, but the begining of new stanzas should really be capitalized. Hmm, I really liked the imagery and vocabulary you used in this and I also liked the flow and rhythm and such. Personally, I don't think that rhythm or meter or whatever matter much, as long as it sounds nice when I read it aloud. There was one part, I think it was the last two lines of the first stanza, where it rhymed. For some reason, that hit me like a speed bump for some reason and it kind of bothered me. I *suggest* fixing that (unless it was done intentionally).

Favorite Line: 'silence calls for an encore in a million different voices (all of which sound the same)as you stand there, palms to the sky to stop this gravity'

Grade: A

Hope I helped, somewhat.

~Jas

Hi there

This is very good. However it feels very dense and too complex. I think you would benefit from simplifying it and spacing it out a bit.

Besides that, very good. Some of the lines here are just lovely. For example

"you can't stop a silver bullet like you used to and it
pains me to think I used to rely on you - maybe I still do"

So great work.

Hi Earendil,

thanks again for the review on my piece Plums. I appreciate it, consider this calling it even.
This is interesting to say the least. Though completely gimmicky, it remains something interesting to read.

The issue I see here would be the fact everything in front of me now is scattered. It's like taking animals from different parts of the world and knitting them together in some sort of jagged quilt. It's just odd, and things seem mishmashed.

If you take a look at all the concepts you throw into this, it ranges from body functions (specific to veins), silver bullets (commonly associated with folklore), a religious reverberance (that is only slighty present and mostly in the last two stanzas), reference to time (last stanza), silence vs. noise, and eels.

The only two that work together rather well are the bullets and the religious undertones. But they don't come hand in hand.

You have an idea, but you've tied all this extra weight to it so it's dragging itself to the mind of the reader slowly.
You have to take it step by step.

What is your main purpose in this poem?
Now, what theme can you tie to it?
Which imagery is relevant to the actual poem and is there a better way to work at it?

Look at your angles, there are lots of different roads you can take.
I'd suggest just focusing the themes in your poetry a little more, rather then just having to tie down the first thing that comes to mind.

Good luck,

Kamas

While you were hiding under you rock (Rocks. They're cool.), a giant aardvark came down from the sky and sucked up all my niceness. So. Lately, my reviews have been just raw critique and minimal praise. It's not that I don't see how amazing people's things are (with you, it'd be impossible), it's just that I think critiques are a bit more useful. Or something like that. Sew. Don't worry if this is a bit harsh.

It's nice to see you/re writing again. Really nice. I was afraid you...you... *breaks into sobs*

Oop, looks like that aardvark missed a spot.

Okee dokee. I'll review this stanza by stanza and then let you know of my overall impression after all that.

even you couldn't extend your palms - not with planets
carefully placed in single file lines, not even with a pen
in hand, a pen to my chest, wriggling ropes of ink
sifting through my veins like silver eels in the weeds,
slithering sickly through the arteries and even
you couldn't keep the canine satisfied as she waited,
taunting my fingers as they relaxed against the table
with magnets in my bones, begging through the marrow
for a schrade to grace her calluses and spill into the grain,
throughout the floorboards and to the window pane.

Guess what I'm going to say. Yep. This whole thing is one. Big. Sentence. You just go on and on with connector words such as "like" or "and" or "with" or "as" or whatever other word you used here. It sounds really strange. Especially in the beginning, since you go a bit too far with the repetition of the gapping commas and present participles. In addition to this, I found another thing to critique you on. Usually I can see where you're going with your imagery and/or feeling, but here I really had no idea. It's almost as if you just threw a bunch of words together with a vague sense of what emotion they were supposed to portray and hoped for the best. It sounds good, or at least the second half does, but other than that the cluttered images kind of ruin what you were aiming for, feeling-wise.

it's starting to set in. earlier this morning, or maybe
maybe it was yesterday morning when I swallowed it whole
and waited for it to singe my skin from my insides to my outs;
it started hurting, it tears and it's burning in my lungs now
like cold steel at penpoint before you pull the trigger 'cause
this one didn't slide as easily as my pride did - this one can't
slide without stripping me of my vocals and breath and I and--
you don't feel the gates open, you don't feel this rushing in;

Hey, this is two sentences! Except the first one is only five words long (or would it be six, since "it's" is a contraction for "it is?" Eh, who cares. You get my point). You've got pauses here and there, I'll give you that - but periods have this special quality about them that dashes and semicolons don't. You know what I mean. So try not stretching a sentence beyond its limit - even in poetry, when the laws of grammar don't apply as much. As far as imagery and feeling, I liked this much better than I did your last stanza. You manage to rein in the freeform you were experimenting with in your first stanza, thus really making this both more relatable and less confusing. A couple nitpicks - I have two problems with "morning." First, the repetition of it sounds off. Second, it doesn't fit with the emotion of the rest of the stanza. "Insides to my outs" sounds odd, too - simply because "outs" is pretty much not a word, unless you're talking about "outs" as in baseball.

you can't stop a silver bullet like you used to and it
pains me to think I used to rely on you - maybe I still do
when they speak of the devil and you don't, when they pass
by the light and you don't... silence calls for an encore
in a million different voices (all of which sound the same)
as you stand there, palms to the sky to stop this gravity

This starts off on a pretty rough note. "Like you used to and it?" I'm sure the wording could be better. The first line, even of just a stanza, is important, because it's the line that is supposed to draw the reader in. Disorienting phrasing won't do this. "maybe I still do when they speak of the devil and you don't" sounds off. It's like your trying to continue with a thought past where it should have ended. I know this critique is sounding old by now, but it's something you're going to need to take note of. A tiny nitpick: change "in" in line five to "of."

why won't you come here to stop this from falling
back to last winter, back, back to last autumn, oh
August, have mercy. please, August, have mercy.

I'm not sure what this has to do with the rest of the poem. Oops, I've got to get to bed pretty soon. This'll be quick. The maze of seasons and months you have here is nothing short of disconcerting. The repetition of "August" only contributes to that. So.

.

Haha. I'm not even going to ask.

Okay. Hope this was helpful.

-Kafka