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I've read a couple of your poems, and this has to be my favorite.
"I’m like a journal, each sheet covered in yesterday’s mistakes."
Is probably my favorite line.
Although this poem is a lot simpler than most of your poems, it feels more personal, more emotional. At least for me.
Holy cow is this great. I really love the way you started it!
I also really like what you did with the description of the journal:
Really beautiful.
Great one, as per usual, Dreamwalker!
So i'm going to go with the obvious and say this is more than a heartbreak? Maybe one of those curl-up-in a ball-blast music -don't- bother -me kind of memories? Yeah, those are tough. This is an awesome portrayal of that. I like the comparison between the paper and a person, or more so, i take it as the paper represents a heart. being torn apart and shredded? causing the most pain? it's a type of poem that leaves the reader to draw their own interpretations. I would definitely add to it, it has a great base, Just gotta finish it out a little bit.
very nice. i could relate to what you have written . been there done that you could say.
start peeling back layers in two’s and three’s
and watch as the skin parts from skin, millimeters at a time.
I’m like a journal, each sheet covered in yesterday’s mistakes.
stacks upon stacks that could be flipped and turned,
and flipped and turned
till the ink bleeds and the soiled pages crumble.
we’ll all crumble, one day.Wow just this first paragraph is extremely well written and this whole thing has no spelling errors.This piece is full of heartfelt description and drama.
you’ve torn my skin away
and I let you, till nothing was left to put back together
This is a great closing line.Keep up the good work sincerely,sockmonkey
Hi! I'm going to start with focusing just on language, if that's ok, and anything else that pops in my head I'll jot down for you, too.
The main issues I see, language wise, is redundancy, and what I tend to think of as line padding where it's not entirely necessary. I've taken your first stanza above, and simply deleted what I think you don't need - I did a teeny bit of tweaking, but not much.
start peeling back layers in two’s and three’s
and watch as the skin parts from skin,
a journal, each sheet covered in yesterday’s mistakes
in stacks upon stacks that could be flipped and turned,
and flipped and turned
till the ink bleeds and the soiled pages crumble.
we’ll all crumble, one day.
Not much done at all! Just tightened it up a bit - but, wordiness is my pet peeve in poetry in general. Obviously what I did isn't perfect, but I do hope it helps you to rework lines a bit to tighten them up and make them stronger.
Now, as for meaning, I'm torn. You have your narrator and the person acting toward the narrator. I'm taking from this the destructive power of love - but, I'm not sure of the how, if that makes sense. Your final line/stanza implies that the narrator acknowledges that she "let" the other person do this and places blame there, yet the second stanza looks to the other for validation. I'm not sure there's enough room in what you have for the journey between each point, especially between just two stanzas. I almost want to flip the first and second stanzas, and it works a bit better, but I'm still not satisfied with that. You can have both, but there has to be something between "make me feel good" and "it's all your fault," or everything falls flat. If it's meant to be a resigned, "I let you," then I'm not reading it from what we have here. I mean, I could, but it's not my initial reaction, and much of that hinges on the "tell me you love me" line in the second stanza.
Thanks for something I could sink my teeth in to a bit!
Mesh
Walkerlove ♥.
There are a few movements of analysis I want to film through for this, but I think that it'd be better, first, if I get my pet peeve for this piece out of the way. That peeve, reluctantly, is line 1.7:
The sentiment is strong and heartfelt--and true--but regardless of the mention of "crumble" (i.e. destruction, decay, falling apart emotionally, falling apart spiritually or physically or in any other ramification of human existence) in line 1.6, this line put me off because of its sheer blatancy. In many more places in the poem--I'd even say the piece as a whole--you've given that prosaic brand of half-subtleties that you know I make a habit of, but this particular line feels as if it doesn't belong because it takes out the half-subtlety and gives us a granite statement. Essentially, you're tying a piece of rock to a bundle of feathers--but those tend to sink.
So while the sentiment is good, and it still adds something to this piece, I would certainly attempt to veil the boldness.
So now let's begin with the big guns.
The Route of Self-Harm
“Start peeling back the layers in twos and threes” gives the reader the immediate message that the narrator is at a low—it’s given in the numbers of layers she’s peeling back at once: two, three, maybe four if it went on long enough—and it tells me that the narrator wants to hurt in a new way. She’s desperate, she’s breaking, and the amount of skin splitting at her desire reflects that directly. This is balanced in her character by the use of millimeters to measure how quickly the skin is splitting—though she’s desperate, she’s critical, analytical, carefully examining how she is hurting herself, which says she has a reason. So what we end up with is restraint in desperation, which brings to mind the Abused Mother of Two from TV dramas you’ve seen, I’ve seen, we’ve all seen. Desperation and rationality. Keep that in mind.
The Route of Emotional Cutting
In this way, the narrator is not doing the cutting—this is an act perpetrated by the second party, the “you” in the equation. On this face, line 1.7 feels almost as if a bitter-to-the-you sentiment, saying “you’ll feel this way one day; just wait.”
Line 2.1 furthers this, bringing the imperative demand: Say What Isn’t True to the forefront. It’s an entirely different mood from how readers will interpret this firsthand, and whether it was purposeful or not, it’s very well-done.
Note that this entire face of the poem is confirmed in line 3.1 where the narrator directly says, “you’ve torn my skin away.” But there’s more to it than that, Walker, because line 3.2 brings blame back to the narrator. Emotional dependence, restraint in the midst of being torn apart: the narrator feels that it’s her fault. And then there’s this.
Inability To Cease Pain
This face hurt me as a person because it’s very first-person to me. No matter if it’s a person hurting the narrator, the narrator hurting the narrator, or someone else entirely hurting the narrator, the narrator says more than once that there is nothing there. There’s nothing left than can hurt.
And what does that say about every other sentiment in this piece? It says that no matter how the narrator is hurt, something else has already come and destroyed her ability to feel it. Pain becomes a numb happening. Assault becomes interaction. There’s no one person to blame here because the pain that has preceded this event—this leaving the narrator cold—it eclipses other pain because it changed her.
You’ve constructed a very strange metanarrative—something I’m probably reading too much into—but it’s poetry done right in my book.
As a final insight, I want to look at line 1.6:
This is a sideways reference to writing out pain, as far as I’m concerned. And the phrasing, whether intentional or subconscious, says that writing hurts just as much as the initial cut. After all, what hurts more between the initial slice of a cut and the process of bleeding it out, feeling the constant sting and throbbing?
Think about it.
Brilliant job, love.
-Ty
Hello dreamwalker, I'm Rose (just one among many in this place).
I like your style, probably (selfishly) because your stream-of-consciousness rhythm resonates a bit with my own.
I have a few specifics:
Firstly, I'm on the fence about your first line: "start peeling back layers in two's and three's". Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm almost entirely sure that the apostrophes are misplaced. The numbers are used as nouns and in that case one would only insert an apostrophe if the intended meaning would be unclear without them (i.e. 0's vs. 0s).
Also, I think line 2 of the first stanza would read better "and watch as skin parts from skin, millimeters at a time"...as opposed to "THE skin parts from skin".
I see what you're doing in repeating "flipped and turned", but it sounds awkward and the phrase isn't, in my opinion, poignant enough to warrant repetition, let alone its own line.
The second stanza seems messy to me, with "there's no flesh under skin" being the gem that validates the whole section. Line 5 was clumsy. I know the "me, me" sounds nice in your head but seems a bit out of place on paper.
Overall, I like the paper-skin metaphor. You could even draw that out a bit. Perhaps lend a little color to your imagery.
You used punctuation here and there in the poem, but it lacked accuracy and consistency. Make sure the poem flows well, and guide that flow with correct punctuation throughout.
"it's cold where you left me" has potential, but it needs some work. A lot of times writers assume that because they're going for a raw, spur-of-the-moment flavor stylistically, they can slack off on technique, which is the backbone of any work of art. If you're not smart about the basics, your poem will flop every time.
So good job on what honestly reads as a rough draft, albeit a promising one. Good luck, I'm looking forward to reading it once you've tweaked it a bit.
Ever open to artistic debate,
S.S. Rose