Young Writers Society

Casa!

So right away, I really love the caution-tape intro. Immediately, I wanted to know why the speaker feels the need to shelter his heart, and I loved how it tied in immediately to the next scene, when we have the movement from caution-tape imagery in a figurative sense, to a more literal sense of the homocide and the police.

I appreciate the low-key pensiveness of the poem. I felt almost a sense of invasion by the police, and I thought that was pretty spot-on and surprising.

The poem does,on one hand, address the answer to the question it raised by presenting the reader with the FACTS of the case: a boy - a homocide - tramatized - and therefore, caution-taped heart. Pretty straight forward, not a bad execution but a double-edge sword. When poetry gets praised as a medium that captures "truth", as a poet, we have to look at what truth is in any given scene or circumstance, and that calls for a specific observation. A lot of people view truth as "facts" but sometimes it is more than what is happening, and more than cause-and-effect -- there ignores an emotional level, the human truth that doesn't really get explored here which gives the poem a more surface-level or colder feel than if it dove into both? If that makes sense.

I want to feel the shock of the boy in the moment. There are busted walls and turned over tables. How does it make the boy feel? There are cops bustling around, how does that make a boy feel? There are scientists groaning about the mess, meanwhile completely oblivious and unsympathetic - how does it make the boy feel? There is a little boy scared, why is he scared? There are workers pleading and begging, why does the boy ignore him? Why does the carcass freeze him up? Who are these people to him? What is the significance of this event?

It can be tempting to write pages and pages, sentences and sentences of all the whys, whys, whys, whys, whys. That's okay. After you get all the emotion out -- you can then go back to pick up the polished, two-line gems to edit back in here.

If you ever go back to this, I'll be here waiting :3 <3 Loved this piece overall for the cohesiveness and the crispness of the lines, a wonderful style that you developed!

~ as always, Audy

Thanks for sharing this poetic description of a traumatic experience that left a lifelong psychological scar on a boy's mind. Reminds me of a famous boxer named Tapia who's mother was raped and murdered in his presence.

Suggestions

As a reader I expected to see expressions of outrage, grief, lamentations. But the poem seems as if it were written calmly. It can be improved by adding some emotion to it. Perhaps by a vow of vengeance or an expressed belief in divine retribution.


....caution[-]tape....
....turned[-]over tables....

...sit busted walls....

"sits" is for one wall.

Hard to imagine walls sitting. "remain" "are" "exist"

As reader I understood the expression "your homicide...." as accusing the person of committing it. "your death" would avoid that ambiguity.