I'm not sure what Kylan's seeing, but this poem is basically a decorated corpse. It's smiling with face paint and you can move its flimsy arms around, sure, but that doesn't make it anything more than a decaying reminder of what could have been, and may have once been. It's just a bad piece overall, but I suppose for NaPo nobody could expect more than hackneyed junk to come out of most people's minds. One poem a day, always meeting a deadline, etc. It's unhealthy. But I digress.
Navita wrote:today, for the first time in years
I tasted the mauve juice of
sky after a heart-ridden storm.
Right, so where's the catalyst? Let's break it down; "for the first time in years" is no way to begin a poem (keep in mind that I always speak in generalities, for they are sadly usually so true). So you tasted the whatever for the first time in years. Congratulations? That statement is just pandering upon itself, begging on its knees for the reader to keep reading so he will know what's going on. A trick strategy and not one that sits well with anyone. Only Shakespeare can dole out entire stories before the action even takes place, and unfortunately this tried and failed miserably.
Commit yourself to certain stretches of either no-imagery or imagery at a time. Tripping over the fence and landing on either end from time to time gives the reader no confidence in your abilities.
"Mauve juice"? You're just searching for words to use, aren't you? And it doesn't work, not in the slightest, but rather sticks out among the generally mundane vocabulary you use otherwise.
lily clouds tossed in the air
and lightning on white stilts
clacked onto stuttering roofs –
Here's what I meant about you completely wasting potential. Lily clouds. I haven't heard that many times before, and was expecting you to follow through on it. Absolutely nothing. So the clouds are lily-like, great. Isn't there anything else you'd like to tell us? Even if you don't want to expand on this possibly beautiful imagery now, a one-liner per image is tearing your poetry apart with its mediocrity. What's the symbolism of the lily? The purpose? Once you answer that, tie it in to later sections, creating a web rather than a straight line from point A to B.
we had abandoned the red jeep
somewhere between the field, the
highway and the burning horizon
What makes the burning horizon so special that it deserves the adjective (which, by the way, is tacked on with so much elegance as a wooden board being nailed to a door)? Again, you're hunting desperately for imagery and sticking it in at odd intervals. Stop it.
and the wind wore my faded
straw hat like a rolling banner;
not even the coral thunder slashes
could leap between your hand
and mine. ice splinters toppled
from the slippery tongue of eve
Horses' bones are too hard to beat, so I'm going to skip the line-by-line for this section and just say that it suffers from the same hit-and-run description that you seem to want to use for everything else. The stanza below (mewling like a cat, paws, etc) is equally half-baked.
into finned ditches, and the mewl
of day lay down to sleep, paws
covering its eyes as you and I
chased the edges of the rain.
And predictably we end our poem with another cheap magic tricks, considering that's all you apparently know how to do in your work. So there's a space between those last two lines... because you want the energy to evaporate before end? Right before you talk about chasing and rainstorms? Why? No, artificially squeezing the juices of your poem's theme/mood/tone/etc like a watermelon isn't going to do anything but maybe give you a quick drink and make the watermelon look dead. If you want something a little more far-reaching than three second enjoyment, try to use your words to create this effect. Don't get me wrong, many people use line breaks like that, and well too, because they manage to weave together the fabric of the power of their speech with the style of their speech. But you can't. Your words suffer from deprivation of all elements on their own, making this kind of break a crutch rather than an accessory.
In general, this was shoddily written and executed even worse. NaPo is cute and all, but hopefully you will soon start producing work of better value after this is month is over. Scrap these pieces and kick your mind to get it working on stuff that you can write without constantly having to look at the clock and see if you're writing fast enough.
Hope that helped,
Galerius
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