Headlights

Spoiler

I haven't been writing for a couple of weeks. Everything has gotten weirder than usual.

caught in a storm that seems like it heard you
say how bored you are. the wind eats at the lining of your coat
like moths, wriggling between the seams.

you dropped your stomach in between the spokes of your bicycle
and watched it go round and round
and you were sick at the side of the road.

a deer came out from the trees
and watched you retch and when you turned to look at it,
it stopped, paralyzed by the lights of your eyes.

you stared back,
and coughed up your heart.

Wow.

This is really an incredible poem...and very, very simple. I loved the tone, and the opening lines, and the severity of the images even though they were brief.

There were only two things I didn't like: moths are too easy a metaphor for clothing-eating, and it seems like if the word were replaced with something more obscure and more direct it would hit harder. I don't know how to phrase what I mean, exactly, and it's almost unnoticeably minor, but I do think that simile could be improved.

Lastly, I think if you changed

Persy wrote:it stopped, paralyzed by the lights of your eyes.

to

Persy wrote:it stopped, paralyzed by your eyes.

it would flow a little better, and readers would still get the headlights metaphor but less bluntly. I recommend reading it that way and seeing if you agree.

Anyway, this was a great poem, and definitely one of my favorites here at YWS so far. It stands out, and you clearly are an amazing writer.

Hi there. So I like concept of this, and your images are fantastic. However, I felt that the poem read like a long, run-on sentence. But that's easy to fix.

caught in a storm that seems like it heard you
say how bored you are. the wind eats at the lining of your coat
like moths, wriggling between the seams.

I don't enjoy the way "like" sounds twice so close together. The first "like" could be changed to "as if." This would actually make it flow better, too.

you dropped your stomach in between the spokes of your bicycle
and watched it go round and round
and you were sick at the side of the road.

Maybe that last line would read better as "making you sick at the side of the road." This is what I mean when I say that your poem reads like a run-on; you use too many "and"s, making it sound rushed and forced.

a deer came out from the trees
and watched you retch and when you turned to look at it,
it stopped, paralyzed by the lights of your eyes.

Perhaps instead of that "and" after retch, there could be a semicolon? This would seperate the two thoughts and make the "stopped" in the next line have a greater effect, if that makes any sense...

Other than those small issues, like I said, I really did like your poem. The ending was abrupt and effective; I liked that.
There's not much more I can say about this, so I'll just settle for clicking the "like" button.

This is really good. I love the concept and the imagery. I liked your use of similes, too. But I think that the flow could have been better. It was a bit choppy and irregular, some lines with a lot of syllables and others with only a few. I liked the way that you arranged the stanzas to all be one sentence split up. That's kind of hard to pull off. I've tried. Anyway, I really like this. It's got a lot of feeling weaved into the words. Keep up the good work.

This really caught my attention because I have a short story of the same title =] But anyway, I really enjoyed this. Its cool to see how you can have the same word, but have two completely ideas and interpretations and ways to connect the words to an event. So yeah, I thought this was really cool =]

I disagree about the moths, I mean it's more about the movement then the clothes eating and in that sense is observationally precise, besides which the physical eating of the clothes is not something we typically witness, mostly the aftermath, so it's still a fresh image. Here is a vague useless comment for you, but I think if all the movements aligned, if you continued and interlocked them, it would be that much more compelling, the wind, the spokes, the body, like a kinaesthetic sculpture or a futurist painting, everything defined by its own machinations. At first I wanted more taste but now that idea seems like a diversion. I like the idea of human reduced to mechanical, which is in part, the join to the title, but how, when are in an extreme state, we are reduced to mechanical functions. I like the conflict between ideal, abstract identity and physical reality, and then being brought back to the idea that the distinction is arbitrary, and unguarded. The movement between the spokes is not quite right, it may take some research to capture.

Well, now. That was interesting. Didn't make a whole lot of sense, but it was good, anyway. There were some things that could've changed, though.

Some lines, like

Persy wrote:
say how bored you are. the wind eats at the lining of your coat

and

you dropped your stomach in between the spokes of your bicycle

and

and watched you retch and when you turned to look at it,
it stopped, paralyzed by the lights of your eyes.

were just a little too long, and made the poem lose some of its poetic rhythm.

Otherwise, this was very good. I especially liked the ending. Very morbid.

TSM

Utterly fantastic. Need I say more? Keep on writing.


--Maya

I don't get it, and by "it" I mean "it" but in regards to the reviews. This itself won't be a very effective review considering I'm not nitpicking or telling you much in the editorial aspect because frankly I don't find much to edit. But I think a lot of the other reviews are a little off.

I've read a lot of poems, and I've read a lot that like to be real deep because that's what poems are supposed to be, I guess. And they try to be abstract because that's the other thing poems like to be even though everyone knows putting a capital letter in the middle of a line or using some fancy metaphor does not a fancy poem make. On the contrary, this poem was pretty abstract in both ideas and structure, but that's exactly what's good about it. You just seemed to write it instead of trying to stuff it down a thin tube of profoundedishness.

There's just certain things that aren't meant to be edited. Some poems I just absolutely hate, but this was a good one, and I feel like I can't touch a single shape that it makes and offer my opinion on making it into another. There was a simplicity in the words and structure, but it felt solid, like it was easy to look at but on the inside you knew it was made out of metal. Something different about this poem. But whatever, I liked it.

P.S. What MSDavies said.

I really love this, the imagery is great. This is going to be a terrible review, but I needed to say that I too think some of the earlier advice is bad. The wording, as you have it, is important. I hope you don't change it, because what you have is really unique, and it has a strong style so changing around some of the wording could detract from that. In particular, the sentence about the lights of your eyes doesn't need changing. If you changed it, the rhythm would be disrupted and that would be bad.

I liked this so much I coughed up my heart. Really, I did.

Howdy,

SO close, yet so far. Not quite understandable. Yet simple. Hmm, makes you think. Maybe too much? I don't know, honestly. I read it a few times, and I feel as if I need to again.

Farewell,
-A.