a beautiful contrast between the people we are on the outside to the people we are on the inside.
They hear you, you realize.
They hear each fragile refrain of emptiness upon your lips,
the kind that derives from the most tangled roots of despair,
clawing and dragging and yanking even the bravest down,
down,
down,
until nothing remains but whispers,
broken fragments like shards of a bottle,
scattered along a white floor.
They remember every cry that echoed
inside of a glass room
as you realized you had been shattered irrevocably.
-
They see it, too,
the hollows of your eyes
and the pained smile
smeared on your mouth
in the finest red
which matches the streaks across that floor.
-
They know, I think,
what your mind tells you,
each whirlwind of beautiful thought rushing
and spinning
upon your consciousness
like the storm of some terrible night,
transforming each word into a monstrous beast,
urging you to believe that nothing whole remains.
-
But hearing, seeing, and knowing dramatically differ from doing,
and you’re far too gone already for them to carefully pick up the pieces,
so they sweep the shards under a carpet of concealment
then wash their hands.
a beautiful contrast between the people we are on the outside to the people we are on the inside.
Hello! I've come to review!
So I can't say this was exactly gripping for me because I actually really have no clue what this is about. The stanzas feel disconnected, like they're talking about different things in each one, but a poem should be a cohesive unit, each stanza focused on different objects, perhaps, but certainly focused on the same subject.
Here, I see the same objects, but not really a subject to hold them together.
1st stanza: Talking and saying nothing, being broken because of it. Also, I know the title of your poem is "Them," but you must reveal the identity of Them at some point.
2nd stanza: Dressing up, similar to talking and saying nothing, however the red matching the red on the floor implies that the person has already been broken; are all the stanzas happening at the same time? Also, who is "they"?
3rd stanza: So they know that the MC's actually smart even though they broke her/him/xer? This is confusing.
4th stanza: The first line hints at clarity that we're not getting in the poem, but to me it does not connect to the rest of the poem. And the rest of the objects connect with earlier stanzas, but what do the objects mean?
I think that is where the issue lies. You don't provide clues as to what each object symbolizes. Yes, we have an overall feeling of brokenness and emptiness, but symbolism is the concrete visualization of abstract qualities. So you need to provide clues as to what these concrete symbols represent. That way, your objects will connect and make a more cohesive poem altogether.
Some of your imagery is beautiful, particularly the imagery in the third stanza. However, some of it seems clunky. Let's take the second to last line:
The phrase as I know it is "to sweep it under the rug" meaning to cover up a secret without really doing anything about it. You probably wanted to avoid a cliche, but really, you only made it obvious that you were avoiding a cliche here.a blanket of concealment
I thought that the repetition of showing the character's emptiness remaining was the connecting piece of each stanza, but I guess it wasn't clear enough. Timmy here
I will attempt a review at this, but it will turn into a short one. Not much to say here, even if you welcomed me to shredding this. I wish I could. Oh, how I wish that. hehehe
Let's see what I can find. I'll just read through and comment as I go along.
One thing I am seeing in this piece which I think could be looked over and tweaked a bit is the redundant repetition of many aspects of this. And I am not talking about the repeating of the words in the beginning (They hear you - although that seemed somewhat so), but your repeating of the descriptions throughout. Whether they were intentional or not, it seemed to not have a point. You described the floor. It was white. Then you described the marble a few lines down. Guess what color it was? Yeah, you got it - white. Lucky guess. So I think you could take that description and mend one of them, taking out one of the white's and adding a more powerful description than simply the white to that. There are so many colors you could do, so many mind-gripping images which could soar with your style. I think you need to work on a bit of those wording. It's not that white doesn't give an image or anything, but the one that it does give is somewhat... bland. A white floor. Not hard to see, yeah, but I think you could build on the picture we have here and use different colors and swirls and vibrance and even possibly some dust on the floor mixing with the glass? I think you could really strengthen the descriptions and emotions in that part simply by adding a bigger image.
echoed soundlessly
staining it
then wash their hands.
each whirlwind of beautiful thought
120,360 Literary Works • 649,588 Reviews
Points: 2003
Reviews: 62
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