I best described the feeling I had as that of an innocent young man
waiting for his execution. It wasn’t butterflies filling my stomach,
but the the heavy metal scale of judgment.
My heat beat rapidly because it knew every owner of eyes
would scrutinize me, listening to my words, the gear in their mind
working to put my argument under ‘logic’ or ‘garbage’.
When the speaker announced my name, I stood up, conscious
of a blanket of sweat soaking my shirt, a viewable evidence
of me being a green bud exposed to the battlefield of words.
When I opened my mouth, I started to produce flowers of pleasantries,
hoping their vibrant colours and blossoming petals would charm the judges.
I adjusted my stance so that all they would see was a young man
with straight posture and effective gestures, emitting authority
as easy as a flower emitting its enchanting fragrance. And yet,
there were quakes in my voice, trembling in my hands, threatening
to reveal the unsteadiness of my heart to the important bunch who mattered.
Addressing my opponent, the head of his team, I started to mouth off
swords and spears and other sharp weapons to the paper from which he read,
breaking his argument into shards, with which I used to wound his heart,
shattering his credibility as vicious as a judge putting a sentence to a witch,
weaving the light of exaggeration and mockery to illuminate the glove of blood in his hand.
After my attack, my mind was devoid of thought. Emptiness. Something that I feared.
I was in a maze. What to do? What to say? What to think? Panic. Lost. Blending together
to melt my composure. Pulling me into the deep sandpit. And I -
I -
There was
a whisper besides me,
a silvery voice belonging to my Prime Minister,
guiding me on the path to take, the words to say, to strengthen the assigned belie
of my team. She was there; I wasn’t alone. I had never been alone in the first place.
Another person, the last of my team, reassured me with his iron-clad voice of
‘don’t worry, I’ll crush them until they’re un-fixable’. Hearing the cool metal of his voice,
I took a deep breath, the thought of knowing this battle was ours, not mine.
An intake of fresh air to stabilize the fluctuation of my breath, then mouthing of bricks that,
at the end of my performance, formed a Wall of China: formidable, the perfect defense.
They made up two third of my school’s debate team. I was aware that
they did not provide me wings to be the first to fly; they couldn’t take my place
so that I didn’t have to experience this uncalled mixture of feelings, but
they were my oxygen, assuring me to have no difficulty in breathing.
If I was a blind man, they were my stick, a reminder I was not in the dark.
When I sat down, we were united in posture, waiting for the opponent
to retaliate as his/her turn arrived, and we saw. The dissonance, a clash of demeanour
in the other side of the battlefield. The scowl their leader gave to his second-in-command;
the shrinking figure of the second-in-command, like a flying ballon that slowly lost its air;
the grin over their supposed killer, as if he treated this debate as a chess game.
We exchanged glances and smiled. ‘We’re going to crush them,’ we concluded uniformly,
loud enough to send a message to our opponents that this was our battlefield .
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
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125,020 Literary Works • 672,731 Reviews
Not gonna lie, I want this in comic form.
The shift between reality and fantasy in the narrator's PoV are critical to the narration, so when the storytelling gets off on a bit of a ~tangent, it's almost hard to digest in places, but it's a very good taste when taken in. I enjoyed the read, but truth be told, it's a scenario where it totally belongs in another medium. There's something to be had when you can see the visceral details of the shards and sharp attacks and words-slinging-knives-that-aren't-knives. It's a bit of a murder scene for the literary world, so kudos.
I will confess that the cheese factor cranks way up in the second half when we enter the Our Powers Combined! trope, but it's ultimately okay in the grand scheme of things because it's a good lesson to remember. Some of the comparisons the narrator makes between his teammates are odd to me, putting me at odds between understanding if the narrator is the shot caller, point man, or if each member (prime minister???) is of equal value. I'd like to think the prime minister is of equal value!
Overall it's just careful attention to details that makes the execution a pass or fail in places. Easily patched-up holes with gum and duct tape, but I swear if I ever see this in comic form I'll give you the biggest hug.
Ty
Well, in the debate team (government side) there would be three members: 1) Prime Minister, 2) Vice Prime Minister, and 3) Minister of Defense.
The persona is 2. He has two jobs to do. First, arguing the Head of Opposition's points. Second, putting another layer of the government's argument (ex. why this is good socially or economically, etc.). Sometimes when you're so caught up in the offense, you forget how to start your defense. 1 or 3 can whisper to him the opening lines.
After 2, it's 3's turn. 3 is not going to go on defensive; the time to defend your side is over. His job is to mercilessly attack and attack all the opposition's points, but his targets are Head and Vice Head Opposition's, not the third (because of the turn system).
At the end, Prime Minister will make a wrap up. She doesn't have anyone to argue against because she starts first. The wrap up is the last step to convince the judges the government side should have more points and win. So yeah.
Thanks for the review anyway, definitely think this should be a comic. :3
Lightsong,
YWS is not very kind to this poem on mobile. By chance I turned my phone portrait and enjoyed it loads more. An aside for the cellphone users among us :^)
So! The style opens verbosely, kind of Dickens-esque in its dignified manner, also a lot of -ing verbs and overlong predicates. All of this serves to give it a feel of formality, pensiveness, and in some ways restrained speech as well. I say this just as a descriptor of what I feel as I am reading this. The title is "battlefield of words" which is a cliche metaphor on its own that desperately needs re-imagining, but in the spirit of YWS' iconic sword and pen, I don't mind it too much.
I like that we open on an execution block, but the execution block is told to us rather than crafted, so I don't get to enjoy the image for long, neither do I get to experience it. I can see where the narrator expands on his thoughts during the moment: mostly anxiety, nervousness, etc. but these are also said in tired ways with the butterflies, and also heat beat(?) It rhymes, but doesn't make too much sense.
What if you build/craft the scene as though it were an execution, rather than solely telling us, you begin to show this to us? The narrator walking up to rest his head on what he thinks is
Spoiler
Spoiler
Omg. Seeing things that aren't there is really scary and off-putting, and this narrator just had his blood-pressure drop and is losing it, and we as the readers want to be able to *feel* this journey alongside the narrator.
I say all of this to say that when building experiences -- because this poem very much heavily relies on the existential premise that this narrator is having this experience of this debate, of this heated battle, and you go through every sweat drop, anxiety, doubt, fears - and I love that you do this, because it is relatable and it is also rich in detail and it gets us into the headspace of this moment in the sense that we are reading thought bubbles-- my worries though is that it is not very effective in evoking this experience, in the way that I want to be able to feel for myself my skin getting cold, I want to feel the off-putting nature of what it means to see things that aren't really there, to overdramatize your fears, to feel as though my bloodpressure just dropped and to do that, the poem needs to utilize more showing, more sensory details.
The second stanza does this *very* well. Notice it's out of the headspace, out of the thought bubble and it's focusing on the body and the drenched sweat on skin, and that makes me feel it too.
Third stanza is very beautiful and I like how you contrast this third stanza with the next one, the "what we wish we sound like" versus the "what we really sound like" is a humorous aside that I appreciated very much. My only caveat would be to tread careful ground with your atmosphere here. We start with an execution block, we gear into battle, and then we get....flowers. So, yeah! Careful with your image switches!
The next two stanzas we tread deeper and deeper into the headspace and we then get a sweet moral about the effectiveness of battling as a team with your comrades versus going at it alone. All of this once again is headspace. Headspaces are not bad spaces, but they need some balance so they don't fall flat. Where's the emotion?
All of that said, I really enjoyed the break of "Pulling me into the deep sandit. And I -
I - "
that was lovely, it was showing scene and movement and emotion via structural changes, and I adored that moment.
Let me know if this review makes sense to you, otherwise, I'm more than happy to chat it out. Keep up the writing!
~ as always, Audy
Totally makes sense! If my laptop isn't broken, my time busy, and my Internet connection, weak, I'll def want to chat this up. I feel like this is my most ambitious poem, you know? Thanks for the review!
The first line feels awkward with the wording. The second and third lines feel like they could be expanded with the "scale of judgement" part of it, going into more depth with the imagery. In the fourth line you have "heat beat" which I think was meant to be "heartbeat". The fourth through sixth lines have a good concept of people judging other people, but the wording felt a little off with some of the stuff feeling as it needed more punctuation or was a little wordy. The first stanza here is generally strong but it does need to be reworded.
I don't think or know if viewable is a word, but it doesn't seem to be. This stanza was weaker in what it was trying to go for. After the third line you could develop more about the green bud and how you blossom to be revealed to war, or something of that sort I think would work. I know that the stanza after this sort of addresses this but I don't think it was addressed in the same way I mean.
The next stanza didn't really do anything for me and kind of bored me with what it was trying to do. The descriptions didn't really feel that special to me and it got a little boring, but it got across what it needed to even if it didn't really do anything new. This was one of my more disliked stanzas and I thought it could have been shortened some because the length of it is long without a real reason. I also suggest maybe changing the imagery into something that isn't kind of generic.
You're trying to do too much all at once here. Try and have a more distinct focus. In the first stanza here the lines need to be chopped up as they drag on for a long time without ending, and in the second there needs to be some more lines that are longer. I felt like you could have better described the weapons in the first stanza with telling how they looked if you wanted and then in the second stanza it feels more like the aftermath of what had happened. The second stanza is weak in that it doesn't really serve any purpose other than to show the speaker is sort of panicked and anxious, which I think could be shown without having the questions fill the second line and instead you going into more detail with the second stanza. I like the idea of making it the aftermath but the execution here was weak for me.
The part after the "And I" line and part just became a mess that didn't really have any direction. The theme became more unclear and it started to feel generic by the end of the poem with it being "this is /our/ battlefield". I think I liked the lines before the "And I" better as they felt a bit more precise for me. This could also be because you have blocks of text but it just starts to bore me near the end with the message. It started to feel rather monotone and without a style with how it was written as the poem went on and developed. I guess I didn't really find any way to relate to the speaker in the poem and that's what kind of threw me off because emotions don't seem to really be here in heavy form.
The rest of the poem feels like it could use some work and some direction. What is the theme of the poem? That's a question that I didn't really find it answered in the poem. We get to know the general theme of war and that they want to win it, but I was disappointed that there wasn't much more. The stanza with the school debate team felt a little off topic and needed to have a bit more tying into the poem since most of it is based on a battlefield and all
You could have also describe the amount of men on a battlefield, their weapons and armor, all of those things. If they had any machines or anything of that sort, use that all to your advantage here and make metaphors and figurative language with it. It'll work best if you use metaphors and figurative language that is or are related to battlefields and all. I did like the sort of chess comparison and I thought you could have talked about pawns being puppets of the army possibly and then the rest too except for the rulers or something of that sort.
I hope I helped and have a great day! (I'm sorry that this kinda sucked I was sleep deprived while writing this)
Alright, Review time!
I absolutely loved the emotion in this, so onward to nitpicking!
"My heat beat rapidly because it knew every owner of eyes"-Heart instead of heat.
... Well other than that, I really have no other ways to point out improvement. The visuals are stunning, so to say. Captivating, for a better word. I could feel myself on edge like the other was, and in relief when they were with the other.
Keep up the good work and good luck in future times!