Essay of the Soul

(I have a feeling like I've posted this before on YWS...but I can't find it; maybe it was a blog post of mine? Ah well)
~~~~

In the course of human souls -
we shine effluvistically bright
by the way the light
shines
through
us.

This lixivium - this matrimony
of man - all encaptured by
the natural demand - like
and Osprey taking flight -
He is restricted by none.

And as we - sometimes-
traipse in the night, we
take no heed but to our
own delights - frightfully cant.

In this un-beautiful network
of immaterial things - it's
easy to get lost. The real
beauty lies so sim-pl-ly.

This balderdash - this incoming storm -
Yet, we still awake and take it all.
And for what?

Vivaciously torpedic is what we are -
Numb- so we can stare the stars down,
down, down til we all
fall
down.

thought it was really good! needed a little work on the flow, maybe changing the choice of word in a couple places... have you tried reading it out loud? =) that can help. or maybe read it to someone else and see thier reaction to it. =) really good though!! it gave me a lot of mental pictures, and kept me enthralled the entire time! =)

Hi Jon! I'll go through and fix spelling mistakes, etc. in red ...

Jon wrote:In the course of human souls -
we shine effluvistically bright
by the way the light
shines
through
us.

Effluvistically? Huh? I looked up the word on google.com, yahoo.com, and bing.com. No results on Google or Bing. On Yahoo!, my only result was this very post. Of course, it's okay to use nonsense words in poetry -- just look at Lewis Carrol's "Jabberwocky" -- but it needs to be obvious that you are trying to make up words. Otherwise, people might think you just don't know English very well. :/

Jon wrote:This lixivium - this matrimony
of man - all encaptured by
the natural demand - like
an Osprey taking flight -
He is restricted by none.

Okay, lixivium. That's either a consulting firm or some salt-water solution, right? I'll quote Nate from Writing Gooder here ...

Nate wrote:American author William Faulkner once famously disparaged Hemingway by saying Hemingway “had never been known to use a word that might send the reader to the dictionary.” Hemingway’s even more famous response? “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

Jon wrote:And as we - sometimes-
traipse in the night, we
take no heed but to our
own delights - frightfully cant.

In this un-beautiful network
of immaterial things - it's
easy to get lost. The real
beauty lies so sim-pl-ly.

These two stanzas are "simply beautiful!" I think that might be an oxymoron. My only recommendation would be to to take out the dashes in "simply." It sort of confused me at first.

Jon wrote:This balderdash - this incoming storm -
Yet, we still awake and take it all.
And for what?

Vivaciously torpedic is what we are -
Numb- so we can stare the stars down,
down, down 'til we all
fall
down.

Excellent! Excellent! I love the ending. Excellent repetition of the word "down." Excellent work!

Hi Jon,

This is one of the worst pieces on the first page of this subforum, and I truly hope that you understand why.

Listen. If you want to write an essay of the soul, then write an essay of the soul. Don't write an essay, take out some fancy words and half-baked ideas, salivate over them to make them look all fluid and shiny, and then lob them into the YWS poetry section.

You've done better than this (from what I've seen before, anyway) so I won't waste too much breath talking about why poetry serves to actually immerse the reader within an environment instead of lecturing him on said environment, etc, but please. Next time, start with an image, not a grand and overarching idea that inevitably collapses because it's spread so thin. Start with one image. A mouth filled with light? Choked by light? Gagged, enveloped, freed by light? Sure. Take the reader on a journey from there using your senses.

And don't make tepid indents on some lines just to make them artificially stretched out and "suspenseful" or whatever your intention was.

Hope that helped,
Galerius