z

Young Writers Society


E - Everyone

Mutually Assured Destruction

by EverySecond


i. It was a war, I suppose, of battle cries and curses, and the adrenaline of weaving a tale of broken glory and honour upon history. 

Your blood stained me, stained everything: my hands, my hair, my clothes and my mind. 

You were everything to me, both weakness and strength, both enemy and ally, all churning together in an ocean of uncertainties, and I always was a poor navigator.

I never had any delusions of what we were, yet you graced the battlefield as though you had stepped out of Arthur's day, mock chivalry apparent in your lilting voice as you most humbly begged for my surrender, for my swearing of fealty to you. 

There was no surprise for you, I know, when I snarled my reply, when I bit out that I would never back down, that I was my own person, first, last and always. 

Our end was forever waiting for us, in a hail of screams and words poisoned with regret, in a promise of destuction most true, it always had been.

//

ii. It was a cold war, if nothing else, and the battlefield was naught but sullen compromise called out across the room. 

You thought yourself a lion; a predator, with fangs bared to tear the flesh from my body. 

Our history was fractured, an ornate mirror that reflected our most carnal selves that now lay in shards upon the ground; the victim of a clenched fist. 

I knew we always fancied ourself conquerors of that foreign land tentatively named love, yet we had fallen too heavily into the game, had staked our claims for dominance far too early to have realised what consequences would rain fire down upon us.

I had suspected your pride would leave you stood there, an army made up of false truths and twisted statements behind you as you declared yourself independent from me, words that would haunt you until the world ended.

Our end was crafted by our own hands, our fates intertwined until I lead you to your fall and you lead me to mine - mutually assured destruction, as only we could make it

Note: You are not logged in, but you can still leave a comment or review. Before it shows up, a moderator will need to approve your comment (this is only a safeguard against spambots). Leave your email if you would like to be notified when your message is approved.







Is this a review?


  

Comments


User avatar
1081 Reviews

Points: 220
Reviews: 1081

Donate
Tue Nov 29, 2016 12:41 am
Virgil wrote a review...



This is Kaos here for a review!

Ah, prose poetry. I don't really know why there were only a i. and a ii. if it's going to be numbered and I think that maybe it could be three parts and not just two? Starting on with the first part, I like the voice that you sort of create other than it kind of becomes a little too much later on in the first part. From what I understand, this first part is about the speaker being in love but there was also a war? There wasn't really a lot of direction about that, and it was rather vague.

That's something that I wanted to touch on, the vagueness of this first part. It lacks imagery, or at least doesn't really have very much and I think that part of this is the letter-like feeling. Describe and define what you mean rather than just using general words, use the experiences of the speaker, metaphors and similes would do well in helping define the emotions of the speaker like with the emotions. Expand and build on those along with the ones you have now like the ocean image.

In the second part of the poem I don't really like the listing for the descriptions that's going on? It could potentially be powerful if it didn't seem to come up that often. I didn't really get anything new from this part other than the ending of the poem and the rest of it is just the first part but reworded in my mind.

The theme that you're trying to imbue interests me but it seems like the poem was really just built around the ending and with the mutually assured destruction. I thought that there could be the possibility of talking about mutual and parasitic relationships, but I mostly just want to be able to experience the poem with more imagery to help create the atmosphere.

Experiment and edit with this.




User avatar
745 Reviews

Points: 1626
Reviews: 745

Donate
Tue Nov 29, 2016 12:12 am
Lumi wrote a review...



You definitely categorized this right when you chose dramatic!

While there's an abundance of Katherinesdetail here, I think you veer into the country of verbosity and make it almost difficult to digest your sentiment due to language getting in your way as opposed to being a conduit.

Basically? You need to learn concision.

Your shorter sentences and phrases are certainly the strongest showings here. The teeth-bared lion. The war. But others drag on far too long for poetry. It's as if you're writing a novel and trying to fit it into a hand-me-up shirt from poetry's closet, and that simply won't do.

Try condensing your phrasing, your metaphors, your descriptions. Make images into metaphors. Make metaphors complex and intricate and nuanced. And make them dense if you want to fit all this in.

My final note is regarding your choice to negate white space entirely--meaning line breaks and soft-pause spacing between words and phrases--and I think it compounds with your verbosity within the piece to deliver something that is very prosaic indeed.

My inbox is open if you'd like to chat about this. Read, write, share, edit.
Ty





cron
Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
— Marianne Moore