Empty

by IvyBlue

Published May 25, 2012

A drunken stupor clouds your eyes
seeping into your veins. 
A haze of ecstasy
becoming a hinderance.
Light words become heavy
and muddled.
Day is dark
and angel choruses
sing sharp.

Symphonic choirs shout your name
screaming into an endless blackness.
Light beams shining on an endless game,
warriors of a lost battle
shout curses.
You stumble across the floor,
dropping your bottle.

Fingers clasp around a pale throat,
straining to make a mark.
Pleading eyes meet yours,
no change occurs.
One falls,
empty eyes layed on black shoes.

Heartbroken allies come to an aid,
making you a foe of fate.
One pulls a knife,
you bat it away.
There is no power in an empty threat
and you stagger onward.
Trails of blood follow you.

They follow you,
as I have for too long.
A blatant disregard for love
is too much.
I stalk up to you,
kicking aside your prey.

You sit on a pile of bones,
and lay claim to the weak.
I climb the mountain,
as you preach false truths.
One hand covers your mouth,
the other, the back of your head.

I make an end to this tyranny,
and I pull.
Comments & reviews · 1
User avatar
Rydia
Review
Rydia wrote a review Review · May 25, 2012

Hi there, I shall be your reviewer today! Okay so let's take a look at what you've got here and I'll make a few comments as I read along, then try to give you some more general advice at the end:

A drunken stupor clouds your eyes
seeping into your veins.

I'm actually going to stop already and give you a quick lesson in the dramatic. This is not a dramatic way to start a poem. It reads like prose. If you put this on one line, it could be the first sentence of a novel and we don't always want to see that in poetry. We want to see you playing with the language and the sound of words because poems are about sound. A really quick and easy way to change the focus of this and make it more interesting is like so:

Your eyes are clouded,
a drunken stupour steeping in your veins
like tea,
that haze of ectasy

There's now consonance in the 'stupour' and 'steeping' and there's a rhyme with tea and ectasy. It's just a quick example but basically, poetry techniques are your friend.

Light words become heavy
and muddled.
Day is dark

Lesson two! I love that you move on from the light heavy to the light and dark comparison! That's really nicely done but if you change 'Day is dark' to 'Dark is day' the comparison will be even more effective and it has a better sound to it. Don't miss out on opportunities like that!

You stumble across the floor,
dropping your bottle.

Another one! Play with the syntax more, remember you're not writing prose. You're allowed to exercise that poetic liscence: break up sentences, switch around the nouns and verbs. Here you could have:

The floor stumbles across you,
the bottle dropped,
drop drop as the liquid
pours out.

Just a quick example but hopefully this shows you how words and sounds can be played with! It might help if you think of poetry as a game that breaks and subverts the standard rules of writing.

The next few stanzas don't connect as well as your previous ones and you seem to be saying a lot without saying anything. I'm also not sure about your ending or in general what the story behind this poem is. It seems to lose its meaning in a string of images and while I liked those images, I'm not left with much of a sense of character or purpose. Maybe try writing down what the plot of behind this? Like, what's your content? See if you can sum it up in a few sentences and then that's the story you want to pass on to your reader.

Hopefully I've given you a few things to think about! Send me a pm if you have questions,

Heather xxx



If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.
— Mo Willems