Young Writers Society

This poem is very well put and you are pretty good!

lol no you're not

And here, with one of the most brutal concepts in human-to-human history, and it's a grocery list.

I will pause my frustration because it's progress. You went a bit deeper into your feelings to bring out a tad bit more description of your cathartic self.

But you took a shot at slavery and you missed so let's crack into this at full force.

Line one brings us anger. Okay. Color red, blood, ties back into slavery. There's bloodlust. Mutilation. Physical abuse. In nature? Carnations, petunias. You could flip floral symbolism on its head and incorporate fire. Find a flower that symbolizes something positive and burn it? Reverse the symbol, turn the angel into a demon, you get it.

Depression gives you the low-hanging fruit of rain, ice, snow, storm clouds, thunder, isolation, gale winds. So many natural images that come to a singular metaphorical source. Personal favorite? Mercury (poisoning). Burn the end of the depression line because depression in and of itself is an invisible disease. No one can see, measure, or quantify depression. They cannot assign a color to it. Therefore it is unnecessary and a hindrance to your flow and narrative to waste breath placing the depression when the reader already knows where it is--OR if you're going to give us a location, put it somewhere meaningful. There are places on the body in holistic medicine that have specific meaning and symbolism. Meaningful research, powerful results if you choose to utilize them.

Line three is a waste. Burn it.

You've already said what you say in line four. Make me care for its content or burn it.

You're a slave to her memory. This could be a promising image, though the phrasing is verbatim overdone a thousand thousand times. It's time to evoke the actual ideation that comes with slavery because you're the one who chose it as the backbone of your imagery. Brutal and uncaring, possessive, ready to move on to the next sack of meat and bones to whip and shred and kick until you rattle when you breathe. That's the minimal depth of slave imagery.

The last three lines do nothing. Burn and rewrite.

Good afternoon, Casanova. You know what I'm here for (reviewing, duh. ), so let's get to it.

...To be honest, this isn't great shakes. It felt dull. While the piece itself isn't problematic, and I admire the fact that you were willing to discuss a small emotional picture within a few lines, that's all that I got from this piece - the names of a few emotions. Anger, depression, false happiness, sadness. It lacks context and solid explanation, as heartfelt and as meaningful as it may act. I don't have any emotional reason to care for the narrator or their romantic interest, as I have no idea as to what experiences that they have gone through or suffered, and why the main character is a slave to anger/depression/romance/whatever it is. How they are a slave is addressed and discussed, but never why. Frankly, this piece leaves me disinterested, as it seems dull and disconnected. The usage of repetition in place of vivid descriptions and emotional depictions reminds me more of a song and, while it can be executed well, it was suffocating this poem. I got incredibly tired of hearing "I'm a slave" without context or explanation when I reached the end of the poem, and a part of me wanted to shout "I get the point! Is there anything else you'd like to mention that you haven't mentioned over and over again?" Throwing this into your title and poem's description doesn't do this piece much justice either.

In the end, what this piece needs is a renovation. Tell me why I'm supposed to care for this couple. Experiment. Throw in metaphors, descriptions of different parts of their relationships, and how they correspond with the narrator's present feelings. Why have the been reduced to this state? What else does the narrator possibly want to say? Give your repetition a context, an emotional and narrative development, or at least spice the emotional sensations of this piece with figurative language. Right now, this simply cannot do. It's touching, and perhaps it has a lot of personal significance to you. Indeed, this seems to carry with it some heavy amount of emotional weight. But without a clear context, established characters, maybe some plot events, and the typical elements of a poem used to convey a lot of emotional impact within a short amount of lines (i.e. figurative language), this just fell flat. Some of the lines also came across as incredibly odd or hard to read ("I'm a slave to this depression that's one the inside" was particularly bad, in all honesty. Depression is quite generally internalized, and I think this is unnecessary repetition that interrupted the general pattern and composition of the poem. "I'm a slave to my depression" would work far better at communicating the same point without coming across as awkward or interrupt the main train of thought, although it still needs some weight behind it.)

And that's about it. It's a decent poem, and I appreciate the effort you applied to this. However, I just can't relate to it, and that is the line that divides the good and decent poems from the strong and great ones. It's not a bad step in the direction to writing good poetry, however, so I suggest you keep going. That's what brought me to my current level of writing poetry (even if it isn't the best one). Anyways, thanks for presenting this poem!

-Silver

This is Kaos here for a shorter review for a shorter poem!

You did a lot of listing off emotions again in this poem, which annoyed me. Instead of listing emotions off like being angry or being depressed, try to express that into the poem rather than just saying that you're sad mad pouty and angsty, because I won't believe you until you show me.

I felt like this poem was going in a better direction of trying to have a simple sort of idea that you're trying to convey. So you're trying to make a poem about you being a slave to the memory of a past love, now write around it. Once you have figured out a base idea, you need to build around it until there is a forest of beautiful trees of imagery around it.

I also felt like there was a sort of wasted potential with the imagery of the poem as maybe you could have done something with it being a cage on you with you wanting to be free from it or possibly it also being some sort of shackles or handcuffs that kept you from doing things that you've wanted to do before.

Overall, this was quite the simple poem, but it seems that it was meant to be. I think that you could have focused more on making each line powerful as this is a short poem, and you can use it being short to your advantage of nothing dragging out too long or anything of that sort.

I hope this helped and have a great day!

Hello.

Obviously meaningful poem that uses very straightforward language, trying to convey things in little packages and letting us fill in the rest.

That makes good diary entries, but not the best poetry. Right now, I'm not truly feeling any weight of the words because they're simply placed within sentences, the lines broken up along the lines of a poem.

I personally read poems to feel the full extent of the author's pain, and this piece doesn't do it for me. Obviously the words are heavy and hard and the emotion inside must be overbearing, but that doesn't truly come across.

Insert some examples, and don't be afraid to unpack the full extent of every single emotion listed in here. Poetry is best done unpacked, because unpacking means the readers feel what the narrator feels. Make me ache, give me context, give these words a situation that show how the narrator is a slave and how heavy the chains are.

Until then, this piece will be a lackluster piece good for general venting, but lacking the impact that makes a strong poem.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

~Rosey