z

Young Writers Society



perfect on the surface, broken at the seams

by SpiritedWolfe


i see a girl. 
she is a girl who knows what it means to smile. when
her face grows red from the strain and
her cheeks grow weary from plastering the pleasure
for the world to see. for she is for the world
with her thick, curled locks
and her soft, calm eyes
and that smile that never leaves.

i see a girl
who skips across the street even when
muck crawls up her leggings from that short detour she took --
the one that led her right past depression
and she slipped trying to run up the hill she came.
her trademark smile stays strong,
chiseled on her rosy face and
complimenting her burning eyes that
swallow the sun whole because she's just that. damn. happy.

i see a girl
with dirt smeared on her cheek and
cracks leaking through her skin as she smiles,
but she can't cry.
she never learned how.

i see a girl
who is crumbling.
her clay mask washes away with her newfound tears as
she learns the new ways they trace her cheeks. sometimes
she wishes they were fingers running along her jaw.
i tell her to start off small, like a narrow river that widens
but her ambition ignores me and she almost drowns.
the worst part is she doesn't know why.

i see a girl
who forgot how to breathe air because
she spent so much time inside watering the weeds.
she forgot what it felt like to be whole.
now her soul is littered with holes and
her heart spends too much time collecting the pieces so
she never has time to start putting it back together.

i saw a girl
drive a pencil into her heart because
all she wanted to do was write the words across its tissue
so she wouldn't be forgotten. but she cried so much that
her heart grew soft and weak and
it snapped before she could write out "i love you."

[i didn't mean to do that to you.
even if you did this to me.]


Note: You are not logged in, but you can still leave a comment or review. Before it shows up, a moderator will need to approve your comment (this is only a safeguard against spambots). Leave your email if you would like to be notified when your message is approved.







Is this a review?


  

Comments



User avatar
131 Reviews


Points: 33
Reviews: 131

Donate
Sat Feb 06, 2016 6:20 pm
View Likes
Monsters wrote a review...



she is a girl who knows what it means to smile.


This whole poem is like this sentence. It names a random disjointed piece of your intuition and gives the readers none of the tools to comprehend, understand, feel it for what it means. It is empty. R.P Feynman, a Nobel prize physicist puts it perfectly when he says

R.P Feyman wrote:You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts.


Therefor, you aren't explaining what it means to know the meaning to smile, you are naming it, and we will take whatever society inadvertently applied to the cliche in the first place.

It's all trying to resemble a poem, the way you speak, but it has no substance. Sometimes you are just running with arbitrary things like, the paradox (for lack of a better word) in the first stanza.

you say,

her cheeks grow weary from plastering the pleasure
for the world to see. for she is for the world


This actually makes no sense. 1. the first line just seems arbitrary to mean. 2. she's plastering pleasure for the world to see AND she is the world, so she's doing what exactly, plastering pleasure for herself to see?

There's more but honestly, most readers will probably read this poem trying to reach the end so fast that these details don't even matter to them. Which is exactly why substance-less poems are so.. uninteresting. Try writing less, and make it have some more substance. By the time the reader gets to the bottom, what exactly is left to think about? What is fun along the way? Why would this poem have any lasting worth while impression?






Thank you very much for the review ~ ^^ But I'm a little confused on what you mean by "substance" in a poem. I completely agree this poem is a lot more on the surface, but could you explain what you refer to when talking about substance?



Monsters says...


Here's another good quote %u201COnce you%u2019ve read too many trashy best-sellers, you begin to look for something with substance, something that attempts to define the universe.%u201D Jessica Zafra



User avatar
79 Reviews


Points: 250
Reviews: 79

Donate
Thu Jan 07, 2016 10:10 pm
View Likes
Sevro wrote a review...



Hi Wolfe, here to try to review this poem. I say try because it's one of those poems that is so perfect, that nothing should be changed.

I loved the emotion, and the way you started with "I see a girl" every stanza. Every word you write flows like water into the next, and I almost want the water to freeze, just for a moment, so I can show it to the world before it disappears around the bend in the river of poetry. There are so many connections that you keep going through several stanzas, like when you start by saying the smile is "chiseled on her rosy face", and then you say, "cracks leaking through her skin", and then say "her clay mask washes away". It baffles my mind and my heart that you or anyone can write like that. This was so beautiful, and I want to go on and on about that, but there is nothing to critique. Since reviews are for helping to make things better, and since perfection cannot be enhanced, I will end my review.

Great job, Wolfe. Also, way to go getting featured!

~Caterpickle




User avatar
863 Reviews


Points: 29221
Reviews: 863

Donate
Thu Jan 07, 2016 3:50 pm
View Likes
Morrigan wrote a review...



Hey Wolfie~

I like this, but there's something about it that needs a little more.

Let's begin with the things that work. I like the ending a lot (though I'd take out the comma after "even if" because it just doesn't feel right to pause there). The speaker turns the poem around and allows the reader into their head as well as into the life of this woman.

I like the part where she takes a shortcut past depression, and also where you mention swallowing the sun. These are nice images. And the river. And really, you have quite a bit of nice images.

The turning point is also working well for you right now. Never learning to cry is a concept that is really easy to connect to, and also lets the reader and the speaker into the head of this other person more.

All of that being said, there is a lot of excess in this poem that you could get rid of. It's not wordy, necessarily, but it borders on the edge of being someone who is trying to be better friends with you and telling you something personal. It's vaguely and strangely uncomfortable, somehow. It's on the edge of something lovely, but something is missing.

I think that I want to establish some kind of relationship with the speaker as well as this other person. There's a disconnect there. While I know all about this woman, I know barely anything about the speaker, who is actually a very important part of the poem. Bring the speaker into the poem with something other than the simple statement, "i see a girl." This is a first person statement, but give us more clues as to what the relationship between these two are.

Experiment more with fragments. So many of the words in this poem are taken up by "she" and "her" and we know who you're talking about, so feel free to experiment with breaking it up a little. In general, experiment more in this poem. It feels a little safe for me somehow.

Personally, I don't think the repetition is really working. It doesn't really have any impact, and readers know from the very first stanza that this poem is about a girl.

Now onto my favorite part. While it isn't that wordy, it can still be cut down a lot. The way you can do that is take out everything unneeded and then change some verbs and then add things back in if you really need to. I'll show you with the second stanza.

Below, we take out everything unneeded.

Spoiler! :
i see a girl
who skips across the street when
muck crawls up her leggings from that detour--
the one that led her past depression
and she slipped trying to run up the hill.
her smile stays,
chiseled on her rosy face and
complimenting her burning eyes that
swallow the sun whole because she's just that. damn. happy.


Ok, now that we've taken out all we can without changing too much meaning, we can switch things around a little (Also, I've taken the liberty of making the line breaks a little smoother, moving "and" from the third to last line to the beginning of the second to last line, and "that" from the second to last line to the beginning of the last line. Consider breaking the line after strong words because the weak ends aren't quite working here).
Spoiler! :
i see a girl
skipping across the street,
muck crawling up her leggings from that detour
that led past depression
and back up the slippery hill.
she won't make it, but her smile stays,
chiseled on her rosy face
and complimenting her burning eyes
that swallow the sun whole
because she's just that. damn. happy.


Now, this is just a suggestion, but it allows for you as the poet to have a little less "she did this" going on in the poem if you break it up like this. If that makes sense.

Anyway, I enjoyed reading and reviewing this poem. I hope that you find this review useful to you. Happy poeting!






Thank you so, so much for this review ^^ It's very helpful, thank you!




We're all stories in the end.
— 11th Doctor