the cityscape lights its own match
and flickers with heat from the inside out.
the type of delay that curls its burnt fingers
around the thudding pooling street lights,
and the pounding scrapers that fill your head
with ache and silence.
it’s here you play with fortitude;
the heel beneath the foot that plants real strong,
and you’re cracking the sidewalk, breaking a
pathway through the concrete swell of me.
but this is okay, in a way.
I am a breathing testament to human ingenuity.
a frightening example of an industrial fuck,
and its in this sense, the sirens keep calling me back
because the fire’s only metaphorical – an inner cry
for help – when the firmness of your presence
no longer inhabits my very levels of solitude.
you were the only thing that’s right
in me.
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125,020 Literary Works • 672,733 Reviews
Hai there, Dreamwalker.
Well, I liked the idea of this a lot. But I believe you have some editing to do. First of all, no capitalization? Also you have lots of fragments that make this hard to read and difficult to understand. I really liked your imagery though.
For some reason I found myself loving the line "I am a breathing testament to human ingenuity."
As Meshugenah said, you have good imagery, but your connections and grammar are lost, making it difficult to read.
As I said,
I like the idea of this, but I can't really get into it because of the grammar problems and etc.
But good attempt.
Keep writing
~Cat
I can definitely attest the the punctuation being a little sub-par xD. I have a tendency of being a little reckless when it comes to grammar in that sense.
The non-caps were a stylistic choice, though! I only ever capitalize words I want emphasized. In the case of this poem, it was the immediate I, for its own symbolic purposes. Nonetheless, I take your opinion very seriously, so for that I do thank you.
Hmm, your first line is lovely.
Now, what's going on with your third line to the end of the stanza? You have a really long fragment, and that just doesn't read well. I mean, fragments are fine to use, but here I don't think it makes sense. Your imagery is good, but the structure throws it off in your sentence structure - the fact this is a fragment makes other choices, like "thudding pooling street lights" make me pause - did you mean to omit a comma or a preposition (like "of"), there, or was it a slip?
I love "ache and silence."
Ok, second stanza I'm having the same problem as the first - your imagery is fine, but your connectors are all over the place. Like, it makes more sense after reading it several times, but it's still throwing me off.
Third stanza, nix "in a way," and "an inner cry for help." You don't need the asides, and if anything I find them redundant.
I... have no idea what to make of your last pair of lines. I want to like them, and part of me does, but I also have this gut response of "What?" - now, part of this is probably because I'm having trouble reconciling some of the stuff I mentioned about with structure (sentence structure and punctuation, mostly), but this throws me off and I can't decide if that's a good thing or not. Your only real lead-in to this was your last two lines in the third stanza.
Anyway, you have a poem here I really want to just love, but there are a few points holding me back despite your lovely imagery.
If you have any questions, feel free to PM me.
Mesh