Young Writers Society

Don't let me feel.
Anything. Anymore.
For these worthless words
with their powerful core.

They eat away at my soul and
scream; whisper; mutter; die...
But what do they mean?
Why create secrets; why create lies?

Are they my way
to arise, and be
who I am,
Just not who I want to be?

All you need to do for me
is find the perfect words;
make me
better, create me.
But I can't breathe. Their depth too deep.
Down, down, down, down,
I sink.

Voices speak,
words adjust to you,
But voices exist
as echoes do.

Are these words giving
me a way to speak,
or driving me to madness;
inarticulacy?


These beautiful words,
all for nothing
in the end;
so absurd...
words: descend.

This is very hard to understand, I'm sure If I didn't just write this myself I probably wouldn't have a clue was this is all about...
If you do, then, awesome! But if you didn't... I hope you liked my poem anyway
Please review! I love getting reviews

I loved this poem! Keep up the good work! And by the way, any good poem is difficult to understand. That's the secret to resonance. Those who need to understand it and learn from it, will. You did an excellent job!

Hi! Thanks for the request.

So! I think you have some good stuff in here. The flow and rhythm were nice -- they were simple enough that the reader could follow what was going on and stay hooked until the end. It was easy to understand, but still complex enough that we can tell effort and thought was put into it. Your word choice is varied and it's not repetitive, which is nice. That being said, I do think that this poem could use some work.

Simply put, it's hard to follow. While your rhythm and flow may be simple enough to hook your reader from beginning to end, it's too fast-paced and empty to provide the reader anything to latch on to and understand. I'm not saying that you have to make the message of this poem incredibly obvious an over the top, but just to provide substance. Throughout the poem, you keep referring to a set of words that is troubling the narrator. While that it is a nice start, it would help if we knew what the words were! That way we could understand the narrator's condition and you could play deeper with emotions and make the narrator into someone we can sympathize with and relate to. When you do this, you will also be able to develop your imagery, which is lacking.

Other then that, I don't really have much to say because you seem to have a good grasp on writing poetry. Your grammar is good, and as I said early, your rhythm and flow is good. This just has a few rough edges -- polish those and you'll be good.

Hope this helps! Feel free to message me if you need anything else.

~ Elinor

The is excellent. At your age I don't think I could have written anything with this much depth. I really, really like how much emotion was put into this, and how you didn't make it seem forced or cliche. Overall, it's very impressive and deep.

Wonderful! Simply wonderful! I love it when italics are used in poetry, or any sort of writing, for that matter. And you didn't abuse it. You used just enough. I really enjoyed reading this and I look forward to more of your writing! Keep up the good work!!!

Hello Emmzziee (I assume you're name is Emily, no?). I'm here like you asked

First off, a very nice poem to read. The general consistency of the rhyming scheme was good, but the rhythm felt just a little bit awkward. Maybe you could consider revising the placement and frequency of the punctuation, as currently, it has no effect upon me except to hasten or slow my reading of it; no emotional value in the pace changes. It's not a huge problem, but it's like a fly landing on your cake - you begin to doubt said cake.

Secondly, I felt there wasn't very much depth into the emotions of the voice. It's all very well that the voice is facing psycological hardship because of some words that have been thrown or otherwise, but if she shows no emotional reaction to her own situation, she can be easily viewed as less human, making it harder to sympathise with her as a character. That's the only big problem I really saw, and even then, it can be fixed with minor additions, or another stanza.

Finally, just a tiny little grammatical change - remove the colon in the last line - as it does nothing except break the two word line, which even if a rhythm called for it, would be unnecessary (I had to read it a good 5 times, just to conclude that it didn't work.). Otherwise, spelling is pristine, and grammar is spotless (except there's too much of it... xD).
----
All in all, this is quite a nice poem, and gives a fair insight into the thoughts of the voice, in a way that is very understandable (so relax!). Thanks for the enjoyable read! I hope my comments help you, and please feel free to ask if I'm being vague at all. I'm also going to follow you, as I'm interested in seeing your work progress.

Good Work, and keep it up!
~Elder

Oh my god, that was awesome!

good love it

Heya, Powerless.

I'm here to review as requested. You seem to have already gotten some great reviews, so I'm not sure if I have much else to add. Plus, I badly suck at reviewing poetry, so that may not help much. Anyway, if you have any questions after this review is done, don't hesitate to ask me. I'll be more than happy to answer them.

Overall, I do like this, I have to say. Like Elinor said, I found the flow of this really nice and certainly easy to follow. What I liked the best though was your word choice. None of the words felt like they were there to fill a gap, and none of them were at all repetitive either. I've noticed unnecessary repetition in a lot of poetry on this site, so it's lovely to see that this poem isn't one of them. You had a nice rhyming scheme too, so a thumbs up for that.

I hate repeating what others have said here, but I have to agree with what's been said about the rhythm of this poem. I do think that it's a little fast paced overall. The main problem that's causing right now is that it's stopping me from truly understanding the poem and what it's about. It's kind of like because the poem's moving along quickly, I'm not having much time to grasp the meaning of every word, or being able to understand what those words put together are supposed to mean completely. I think some of it might be partly because of the grammar. It's not terrible, but there is the odd mistake here and there. I won't go into too much detail about this because the other reviewers have already covered it.

My only other issue at the moment is that I don't think you're expressing the emotions as well as you could be. Really bring out those emotions! Even if it means being melodramatic, I want to see you squeezing every emotion possible out of this poem. In the end, you can always tone the emotions down after you've added them in, if you need to. I don't think this is too much of a hard problem to fix though. All it really needs is some tweaking because at this moment, I do like the voice of your narrator. If you add in some deeper emotion, I will like your narrator even more.

I think that's about it, to be honest. Like I said before, if you have any questions, be sure to ask.

Keep writing,

xoxo Skins

They eat away at my soul and
scream; whisper; mutter; die...

I think you should switch from semicolons to commas here. Semicolons create strange, awkward stops that doesn't work well with the rest of the stanza. Or you could try not using punctuation at all to create a blending, chaotic feel.

Just not who I want to be?

This line, in comparison to the rest of the stanza, is pretty long. The double rhyme of 'be' doesn't really do much either. That stanza's pretty short. Maybe you could try taking those lines and combining them, then adding some more new lines?

Otherwise, I can't particularly do a tearing apart of this poem like I normally do, which is interesting for me! But I really like your line breaks. They're effective and the stanzas are split well enough. The first line is fantastic. “Don't make me feel” has a great quality to it. The flow is well-paced and the rhythm is fine. I'm sure you've tried reading it aloud, but maybe that will help you find any hiccups in flow.

Like others have said, this needs a little more structure. I think it'll be beneficial to the poem if you really craft a more solid image to work off of. Like Elinor said, you don't particularly need to beat us over the head with the point. However, a suggestion to go about it in a more subtle manner-- start with one overarching piece of imagery. Making clear comparisons between the narrator's struggle with these words and some imagery will solidify to the reader what you might be getting at, even if they don't particularly know what it is. You've got the words eating at your soul, sinking downwards into something, voices speaking. Choose one of those and expand, elaborate. Personally, how I view words, I think of them as minnows in water you're trying to catch with your fingers, so I would go with the sinking imagery and run with that. It's entirely up to you though, just be imaginative and the right feelings and imagery will come.

I think it's an effective way to really explore those emotions everyone wants to see as well! For example, the narrator struggling against that sinking suggests determination to overcome. If the narrator resigns to sinking, then they have settled for being misunderstood and trapped.

You have a captivating topic to work with, so continue working on this poem. As writers, we always struggle with finding the right words, and finding the right words about finding the right words is quite the tricky task! I enjoyed this, and I definitely see its potential. Let me know if you have any questions!

Best of luck,
octo

I really like this poem..share the talent kid!

This is really good, very deep. I really like it, this is something I wouldn't definetly rate a high score for. Good job, dude, (I call everyone dude, so please don't be offended), and keep making some more works of art!

I read your poem. My heart pounds. I feel....nothing. I honestly feel empty, even physically, and I feel icy in moderate temperature. It takes a true writer to do that. Thank you for bringing this piece of art into the world that we may share it. Wow.

I am so sorry for the delay in this review, but here I am so let’s get down to business.

First I have to comment on you saying that it is hard to understand. Though it is good to make a poem somewhat understandable at the same time you want to allow people to make what they want with it. Every person will form it to their life in a slightly different way if you don’t make the exact meaning really obvious. That isn’t always a bad thing depending on what kind of poetry you write and what you are going for. Personally I think this poem is something you wouldn’t want to shout out the meaning of.

Saying that I’m going to tell you what this poem meant to me. I’m also going to tell you because I wish more people would tell me that when they review my poetry. Actually now that I read it for the forth time I just realized that this poem has two meanings for me personally. The first is how much words affect me, at school, from my parents, and siblings. And how much my words affect myself and my family and how words are always there you can’t change them and they change you.

The second meaning it took on was how I struggled with what I wanted to do with my life. I’ve always wanted to be a writer since I was little, but then, at about eleven, people started to tell me how you can’t make a living at writing and other things. I also wondered if I wanted my nose stuck to the screen of my laptop writing about the world, but never actually living it or really being remembered unless I got super famous. So, this kind of just went through the inner struggles I had.

Usually for a review I start from the beginning, but I have to note the awesome end you have here. I love it and wouldn’t change a thing. It really wraps up the whole poem.

One thing I did notices, though I do like the concept of forming the meaning, was that your rhythm was bit fast. Even if you had an easy meaning it would have taken me a while to catch on because you breezed by everything so quickly. I’m not sure how you could change that. Maybe play with longer and shorter lines or different punctuation you can do. For example your first lines:

you wrote:Don’t let me feel
Anything, anymore

You could change to:

me wrote:Don’t let me feel.
Anything. Anymore.

That would emphasize the words and slow the reader down from the beginning.

Besides that I love the poem. If you had any questions feel free to P.M. me, but I hoped I helped.

Sorry again for the lateness,

A. S.