08/05/02. i still smell him in my kitchen, the smell of green and blue mixed into confusing combinations-- hanging in my air by the fridge and in the door way. i can still see him, his rainy eyes reflected in the dish-water, and no matter how hard i splash at the bubbles they reach up to hang on my eyelashes and swing back and forth, pulling at my tears when i can't sleep.
11/08/02. i feel where his mood swings left crescent shaped dents in my leg, and sometimes i trace them with the pads of my fingers till they're raw and bleeding. the holes he carved with his jagged pen have filled up with time and sand. the sand leaks out if i lay down, so i have to stay awake even if i'm dizzy.
01/01/03.
i can count on my toes the amount of times he held my skin in fists until the sun came up, burning away his lips so he couldn't kiss me. i watched every day for a sign that the rain would stop soon, but it never came, so
even though he held onto my thighs too tight he slipped through my bed sheets, and the streets took him back, losing him in their unendurable maps.
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Canary word: Present
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125,020 Literary Works • 672,733 Reviews
Darlin', you're writing's changed so much since the days of yesteryear and I mean that. So much more depth and metaphor. Imagery where you used to stockpile cliched clauses with sentimental nuances. Or in simpler terms, you've grown.
Just a few pieces of advice;
as much as pathetic fallacy/weather imagery appears to be a good idea (as well as the fact it continued with that sort of brechtian continuity of hitting ones reader across the head with a certain bit of repetition) weather is so overplayed in poetry just in general. sometimes its better to step back and remove anything that suggests harsh weather in ones eyes for the mere sake of keeping that originality throughout the entirety of the work.
that having been said, theres enough water reference to keep the repetition well intact without the stormy-eye reference so I might suggest polishing that particular line up.
two very interesting clauses here but mashed in a way that loses impact on both sides. I'd suggest splitting them up, giving the reader an impression of the left mood being the impassioned one with the rest of the paragraph. crescent shaped dents could easily be its own line you feel me?
remove the 'even if i'm dizzy'. takes away that strong affect. people already understand the detriments of insomnia. sometimes it's good to leave them hanging on the back of that line thinking of far worse things than being dizzy.
cluttered. lots of imagery that leads one to suppose upon a certain topic only to be returned face first into a list of concentrated bits of ill placed imagery. not as strong as the first few stanzas especially with that blip of weather imagery, though I will say the bit with the sun was fascinating.
bellissimo darling. gorgeous bit of imagery.
All in all, I love where this was heading and I love that it's not so aesthetically based as some of your previous work dictates. Interesting use of imagery but a little overreaching near the end. Keep things concise and you'll find it'll have a much stronger impact all around without having that unnecessary showy aesthetic. Just because you can doesn't always mean you ought to.
Much love, as always,
~ Walker
ilu so much <3 it's so awesome when you review stuff cause you know me and ugh thanks babe <33333
Hi, SpeakToFlame. This is Pinkieishere1345. I am your review for today so I will try anything to help you with it.
First off, this didn't look like a poem to me. It seems more like a story than poem because of the paragraphs. Maybe put some lines of these sentences to make it like a poem. Also, you have some errors on here. I know that I am new here, but I know some about English so you need to work on that.
Anyway, this is very good. It seems very interesting and easy to read about this text. I enjoyed this poem a lot. I hope to read more from you some day. Well, I have to go. See ya next time.
Good Job!
Love,
Pinkieishere1345
I'm going to review this for you because my friend fell asleep three like five hours ago and YOU DESERVE A REVIEW.
*cracks knuckles*
Okay, so your prose/poetry abilities are pretty superb, and that's been accomplished so many times and I praise you a lot in private (or, I did when I was still frequenting/have blabbered about how good your poetry is to people who are not you), so I'm going to skip that and move onto crit.
From what I understand, you just sort of whipped this together reasonably quickly, and, whereas I think that stuff like that usually works for you, you can really tell here that that's what you did. Your first line, especially, is really stilted and awkward to read. "i still sometimes" is really awkward phrasing, and it doesn't really flow? Plus, grammatically speaking (ugh grammar in poetry I know), it doesn't make much sense at all. And if you make small grammatical sacrifices in the name of flow/atmosphere/voice, BY ALL MEANS do so, but that's not what's happening here. I get the implication that you were trying to be elegant and quick at the same time, and your version of elegant temporarily switched to some weird form of "unique." Personally, I think it flows much better as "sometimes i still".
And I make a big deal out of that first line, because that's pretty much the problem you have with the entire poem. There are also bits like this:
I know that commas and whatnot sometimes have to be sacrificed for the sake of giving the poem an urgent voice, but if you're going to sacrifice on commas to create urgency, you have to be really super careful with your word-choice (forgive me if I'm wrong about urgency; that's just the assumption I made based on the fact that you're talking about trying to chase something). The worst is where I bolded, when the run-on sentences take a few reads to figure out what you're actually saying, because there's no comma placement to tell you.
You want to create a sense of urgency, but you also want it to make sense/be easily digested (or the attempt at creating the atmosphere is all for naught because the reader has to stop and think about the actions and go back to figure out what goes where).
"no matter how hard i splash at the bubbles they dance away until they are out of reach, hanging on my eyelashes and swinging back and forth" flows better, makes more sense at first glance, and still has no room for pausing. I mean, obviously you're the poet so you could probably think of something five thousand times better because it's YOUR POEM, but. That's me trying to explain my point for you.
And one more thing I wanted to talk about: your punch factor. Here, it's taken away when you put "I think" at the end of the line. I don't really know how to explain the mood differences, but what you have doesn't convey quite as much as it would if "I think" was at the beginning of the line.
"I think his lips would fit perfectly on my neck" puts more focus on the act, and the longing behind it, than the musing (the musing is good, but it's more dull than the other two emotions to read about. Musing should be the undertone; desire and the act in question should be the main themes. If that makes sense).
ANYWAY.
You've got a beautiful piece here. A little tidying around the edges never hurt anyone, and man, I'm super excited to see what happens to this if you do edit/tweak the lines a little.
Great job and keep writing,
~Ishies
omg thanks babe! You're right about the whole being thrown together thing lol, and also at 1 am--I will totes fix these things right now