Out the Window

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The second to last stanza needs some work... suggestion???
This is revised from Through the Window... I only fixed that last 3 parts, though, and basically rewrote the last half of the final one.
I actually had no idea it rhymed until i finished it

I'm falling from a window,
Do you see?
To the boy in the library,
And the girl with the piercing,
Do you see?
I'm not thrusting myself to the rocks,
Not to the rocks and volatile sea.
Not to some beautiful facade,
Or glorified insanity.

No, I lost my balance,
Looking at the world below the top floor.
I broke the glass,
And shattered reflections,
Shattered purpose, reality,
And the ability to be.

Will you know,
That for all my silence,
I'm trying to call out?
I'm trying to learn how to speak.
But there are moments,
Where I look away from the sky,
And wait, subdued,
For the hard concrete.

When I reach the pavement,
Will it be scary,
Or soothing when the cold spreads over me?
What if I become fragments,
Just ugly pieces,
With thoughts still raging inremmitingly?

I'm not always sure
If you'll catch me in time,
Lessen the impact,
Or be there when I fall.
Just know the answer
To 'what happened here?'
And promise me, please,
Not to be those who ask

But I'm curious;
Will I be the girl who fell from the building,
Or the girl who jumped to sea?
Help me not be a story, though.
Instead, make this one of our bad memories.
Grab my shoulder,
Spin me around,
And let yourself tell me not to leave.
Last edited by talkingbird on Thu Sep 29, 2011 10:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"I am still so naive;
I know pretty much what I like and dislike;
But please, don't ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?

-Sylvia Plath




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It's a good poem, with a good rhyme scheme but i think that it can come across a little muddled.

No, I lost my balance,


i think that this line loses the feel a little bit maybe stay away from the idea of a accident. I would finish with talking about another person and saying something like
'you should have tried to make me stay,
but instead you let me go."

it would give a metaphorical sense too. i hope that helps you :)




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I kind of like this, I have to say. So let's start the review.

First stanza - this is... nice, I suppose. I don't altogether like your comma after "library", separating the boy and the girl by a piece of punctuation. It just seems a little silly, like you have this idea that every line of poetry must end with punctuation. I'll let you know right now that that scheme will only confuse an educated reader - especially a stickler for grammar - and they will most likely turn away like that, lickety-split. As for the last few lines, I'd say something along the lines of:
I'm not thrusting myself to the rocks -
Not to the rocks and volatile sea,
Not to some beautiful façade
Or glorified insanity.
I might also think up a different word than "volatile" to describe the sea, as that seems to be a very popular descriptor for that mistress of tricky fate.

Second stanza - Get rid of the "No" in the beginning and the comma at the end of the first line. "I lost my balance looking at the world below the top floor" reads well as a sentence; simple sentences do not make you simple-minded. If it reads well as a sentence with words and grammar - THEN you can split it up into poetry. "I broke the glass and shattered reflections" or "I broke the glass, and I shattered reflections", as well, I might say. Commas connect two independent clauses when working with conjunctions: If you don't have a subject in your second clause, it's not independent. Think of it like "Could it stand on its own as a sentence?" If the answer is no, then no comma. Also, with the last two lines, they don't connect well with commas. "And shattered reflections; I shattered" - "And shattered reflections: shattered purpose" - or something along those lines. Pick a piece of punctuation; they'll all love you for it. Commas just don't work in that situation.

Third stanza. I wouldn't start this with "Will"; I would start it with "Would". It's asking the reader if they would, if they wanted to, if they could. Also, no comma after "know". It's distracting and pointless, to be frank. There should be a comma after "speak", because you're connecting two independent clauses with a conjunction, and starting sentences with conjunctions is just wrong. It also might read better as:
But there are moments
When I look away from the sky
And wait, subdued,
For the hard concrete.

The word "moments" seems to signify "when" and not "where", and most of the punctuation in that sentence was fairly pointless. Read it as a sentence while you're making it into poetry; help it make more sense. (Yes, I am an awful hypocrite.)

Fourth stanza. I think you ought to change the order of the first three lines around - "When I reach the pavement, when the cold spreads over me, will it be scary or soothing?" Also, the word "scary" seems juvenile, unacquainted with the maturity of the rest of the poem. Frightening, thrilling, dreadful, horrific, terrible, awful... There's a myriad of words out there - use them! I have nothing against the last three lines of this stanza; here, the punctuation seems correct, at least.

Fifth stanza. Here, I actually think we can tread a little into the ungrammatical. In the fourth line, you can eliminate the "Or" to streamline the phrase to where it would be "Lessen the impact,/Be there when I fall", giving off a different feeling than the arrhythmic "Or" could have instilled. At the end of the stanza - oh, you've been so good about this, too! If you're going to end your sentences properly, please end them properly at the end of the stanza, because this stanza has little to nothing to do with the next, and it's definitely not a carry-on of the sentence.

Sixth stanza. You did... try... to use a semicolon, but it's not exactly correct. Perhaps instead:
I'm curious:
Will I be the girl who fell from the building
Or the girl who jumped to sea?

And perhaps change "the building" to something along the line of "rooftops" or the like, to give it more of an idea of heights - "to sea", as well, could be something like "from cliffs". If you're going to detail suicide by jumping, give it an idea of loftiness, not just Oh, there's buildings... and the sea...

The last four lines make no sense whatsoever, so I'll leave them on their own. I can't see anything grammatical, but they don't make sense in the context of the poem, and I can't begin to think what you meant by it. Perhaps later I'll look back on it.
stay off the faerie paths



The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
— Walter Benjamin