i woke up this morning with my hands shaking
and all i could think about was how van gogh ate yellow paint because he thought
that was the secret to happiness, about how i kiss your lips as often as possible,
because if yellow paint isn't the answer, kissing you with wild, reckless abandon must be.
i woke up this morning and my lips were blue and numb from the cold you left.
you forgot your wings. i left you 40 voicemails to try and tell you that, but
instead i just kept saying how much i loved you. i still haven't heard from you, so i think i'll keep them. you see, everytime my eyes close, all i hear is the wolves howling my name and i can't help but think it was you.
when the morning comes all i can think about is how
i wish i could wake up dead.
i woke up this morning and felt my skeleton click back into place. your wings no longer keep me warm so
i've had to start sleeping with my spine wrapped around me, a bone gate to keep out the howling. the howling is so loud i haven't slept in three days.
i couldn't stop thinking about those scars on your hand. couldn't stop thinking about how you told me your love was like a religion.
couldn't stop thinking about how you promised you'd never leave me.
couldn't stop thinking.
the wolves have chewed through the ivory fence. i think they're coming for me.
i tried on your wings but they don't fit right, and my shoulders are too weak to carry them anyway.
i woke up this morning with my heart no longer in my chest.
i kept thinking about how lately, my medicine cabinet has been full of bullets, about how
you took my soul when you left. you cut it out of my chest with a bloody knife and left my lungs in ribbons.
i guess that explains why i haven't been able to breathe since you've been gone.
i've been walking in my frosted dreams-- and you haunt them. i'm sorry i took your wings. i'm sorry the wolves tore them to shreds. i'm sorry.
sorry.
i woke up this morning beside you with your hair tangled in my fingers.
the wolves were gnawing on my ribs.
you kissed my cheek and told me i was dead.
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125,024 Literary Works • 672,762 Reviews
hey <3 So you combine a lot of my favorite cliches here and I love them. Icarus has held my fascination since I first read "landscape of the fall of Icarus" years ago in some anthology, and I have a guilty & insatiable hunger for new presentations of that well-worn legend.
There are parts of this I love and the parts I don't are, as Penguin said, simply unclear. Little changes in wording could greatly improve your flow, for example I would change your introductory sentence to
Of course, I'm endlessly fond of saying things with as few words as possible, and changes that small are more a matter of personal taste/voice than anything else. I think it might lend a certain visceral quality in this case.
One thing to consider: I won't say definitively because ultimately it's up to you as a poet, but I would recommend taking a look at what imagery is new and what has been said before. Bullets on your medicine cabinet? Actually, that was one of my favorite parts of this piece. I've spent days mulling it over and I think what really weakens it is dropping the originality/vitality immediately after by talking about the soul. That was almost redeemed with the bloody lungs imagery though, so maybe just play with it and see if there's a way to maintain that energy throughout the stanza.
Your ending leaves me wanting something I can't quite name. There's something else it needs to really line up and finalize the piece for me.
I love the way you took this concept and twisted it about and peppered it with really strong pieces. Another of my favorite lines was the one about you shoulders being too weak to carry the wings. There are a lot of things I love about this and I think the biggest flaw is that it feels fuzzy around the edges where I wanted it to be sharp. Does that make any sense?
This reminds me of something. I'll make sure to let you know if I remember what.
As always, your poetry leaves me vaguely inspired and acutely awestruck. There is something so exquisite in the way you express yourself.
Thank you for posting this, it was a real pleasure to read. <3 <3 <3
http://inkskinned.tumblr.com/post/12512 ... in-his-car
Ilu
Hey, remind me to review this!!
gentle reminder to review <3
Review of this work is very well done with discription of her lost of a soulmate.
I give this a 5 star rating and it was really interesting. Their is always feelings of angry when separation happens in any relationship.
The famous artist comment was very appropriate and used to help explain the loneliness.
I was very impressed with the descriptive nature of this story.
The author was angry her mate left her and I could tell through the story that her feeling of helplessness was appearen't in this. I hope you enjoy this short story I really liked it.
This is so beautiful, LadySpark! I don't know how anyone has the capacity to write like this, but you put your skill to amazing use! Never stop.
I love it!! Keep writing!
Hey Princess,
So you've already been getting a lot of love on this in the form of comments and likes, which is super rad to see. I'm going to go a bit against that grain in my review but we've been poeting together for some time now so I think you'll get what I'm about.
I want to start with the fact that you have a really solid idea here. You're taking the traditional "poor me, all alone, ex-left me" story and turning it into something sinister and awkwardly abusive and emotional. It's not always easy to make a cliched concept into something people genuinely get excited about, in fact, it's almost impossible - but you're doing it here for a lot of people. I really like that you're bringing back the wolf thing - which I believe I remember from a couple other poems? It's good to have a solid theme, to be working through a concept that interests you, as this clearly does!
You're missing the mark with me, it's true. Part of this is through the form, I think. I don't particularly dislike the form you've chosen for this, I don't have any problems with your line breaks really or whatever. What I do have a problem with is the rhythm of your poem, in that it has very little, and what it does have is awkward. I've read your poem more than five times at the writing of this paragraph an each time I struggle to push myself to the end without skipping bits. I don't feel a natural sense of line to line that I've seen in some of your other poetry. A lot of that has to do with the declarative nature of this poem, you're not opening up opportunities to run smoothly from line to line. We stop and start and stop and start. Maybe you're doing that intentionally - but for me it really puts me off reading, because I can't sink into the words.
In terms of the words themselves, you have some really really splendid images in this. I adore "felt my skeleton click back into place" and "a bone gate to keep out the howling." (though I would take out the "a" in the second). I like that you subvert some expectations by having his hands scarred. And some of the other images but I think that a lot of this feels repetitive or just underwhelming. Like "i woke up this morning and my lips were blue and numb from the cold you left." is a really boring line. This isn't an image, it's description and for me it's really not working. You have a couple of these lines that say things but also say nothing at the same time. Why not "behind you the cold send me blue at the tips" or whatever? Play with your images the way you're playing with form, they need it too.
That's it! I've been thinking about it. We're too much in your narrator's head. It's that declarative thing. Stop telling us "I woke up" "I guess" I-I-I, let's move a bit away from that. It's really hard to care for your narrator authentically because they keep telling me everything. I feel manipulated, like it's an overly sensitive teenager who is desperate for attention and keeps trying to push me toward the feeling I don't actually feel. That seems like an odd comparison, but I think it fits the sense of construction I get from this poem. It feels like it may have been a labour to write, that you may have carefully scripted it. You need to rip that apart for me to really get into it.
I dig on your use of lowercase for this, it fits with the sense of worthlessness (?) or displacement that I think your narrator puts across. Capitals would feel clunky and weird when your narrator is giving all of themselves to the Other in the poem. The Other has the capitals, the narrator gives them all away, or perhaps they are taken.
The concept of this poem and some of your lines are very good, and they make me want to keep trying to develop an attachment to your poem. I'd love to see you alter this a bit and convince me that it belongs in my memory. As always, if you change it let me know, I'd love to see it.
- <3
Edit: I just re-read this a couple times and really all it needs is some pruning. Such as
"i've had to start sleeping with my spine wrapped around me, a bone gate to keep out the howling. the howling is so loud i haven't slept in three days. "
to "i sleep with my spine wrapped around me, a bone gate to keep out the howling - so loud i haven't slept in three days."
You're due for some clarity of image, I think. The images themselves aren't a problem at all.
<3
This is a true masterpiece... Please keep writing!
This nearly made me cry.
That's beautiful poetry, right there. <3