prologue:
you are incredibly challenged when it comes to doing the right thing, because
you say,
‘all the wrong things just feel right’,
and all the right things are not conducive to the kind of life
you want to have.
so you've taken up jumping off skyscrapers as a profession.
-
the arc:
monday is the taste of your name under my tongue, powdery and in clumps. you taste like blue pills, like antiseptic rolled into a glass vial and tucked between my teeth for me to find every night when i grin at myself in the bathroom mirror. the doctor tells me that it's normal to feel like this, that i need to stop conjuring fog from my cuffs and pulling aces out of my socks because crude tricks don't help anyone, but he doesn't understand that you drove me off that cliff to calamity long ago and now you're driving me clinically insane.
tuesday is sitting on the linoleum and picking myself off from the floor every time i peel apart. the doctor doesn't understand—it is necessary to wallow, it is necessary to drown because as sure as hell i’m not learning to swim any other way. it’s 1995 again, 1995 and i’m sitting with the tide between my fists, sand building castles i can’t see in the sky, clouds in the spaces between my toes and i’m alternating between blindness and hyperreality. 1995 and i’m drowning. 1995 and i can’t swim icouldneverreallyswim.
wednesday is more pills. thursday is ragged breathing and running through Hyde park searching for a signboard that'll tell me i'm actually in Florida. i’m a loose cannon on a pirate ship; my teeth are wrapped in moss and i’m up to my elbow in the tarry remains of your uncertainty. someone replaced my limbs with a flowery trellis and tore down the roses in favour of weeds. i sit on a bench and stare at the sky and i wonder if artists could predict the seasons if they were blind. the doctor tells me to get out more, but he doesn't know that the bench i’ve taken to sleeping on every night is where you first cut my heart out of my chest and flew away.
friday is ‘hey-i'm-too-busy-to-talk-to-you-but-i-think-you-should-know-that-i-might-die’ day.
saturday is not a funeral, but it is close. i am a hat rimmed with black and you are a glossy spray of paint on a new house. ‘build me up again buildmeupagain,’ you say, ‘i want to be a skyscraper.’ but this time, i’m not sure and i run away before you drive me back all the way to the year i went insane.
sunday night finds me dangling my heart over the edge of a skyscraper, wondering where the sea flows into the sky and if i could ever catch that spot on the horizon. i am drunk on flighty aspirations, but that's the only part of me that's capable of taking flight; the rest of me is just drunk. i am drunk on heartache and on a lackofempathy and toomuchsympathy and the old man at the symposium thinks i should quit the flying lessons and swallow stones like the doctor tells me.
monday tells me maybe he is right.
the resolution:
i am a flag on cold mornings,
fog wrapping around my feet and rubbing my ankles free of grit. i am milky skies
and the soft sighs of an old swing
still waiting
for the right hurricane to set things cascading again.
Points:
Time spent:
IP address:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
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"you are a reality that is hard to swallow down"
Gosh. Just the title itself could easily catch a reader's attention. But let's be straightforward, at first sight, it sounded like a piece written about acceptance --- but no, it is more than that.
"monday is the taste of your name under my tongue, powdery and in clumps. you taste like blue pills, like antiseptic rolled into a glass vial and tucked between my teeth for me to find every night when i grin at myself in the bathroom mirror."
This introduction of your first paragraph is just so perfect, the metaphor was so dramatic and emotional for the reader to feel the emotion you actually wanted to put in it. And then I read on, and then eventually I loved the idea that you used the days of the week as one of the highlights in this piece. That was actually a very great idea. I have never read something like this before, to be honest.
Then let's skip to the end,
"monday tells me maybe he is right"
It kind of like takes you back to the very beginning of the writing --- which was a very smart way to end a group of paragraphs. It seriously made me re-think of the whole piece itself.
ANd the resolution was structured smartly.
so, let me start by saying I love your poetry & how rich with imagery it is.
a lot of my problems with this are small and have to do more with flow than anything. for example,
this line doesn't have the symmetry I wanted it to. the image itself is strong but the implementation is lacking, in my opinion. "in clumps" is just lacking in strength, as a phrase. I'd maybe revise it to say "monday is the powdery taste of your name under my tongue."
I also don't like some of the line breaks you use. they cut up some of your most beautiful phrases (your final line, for example) and break the intensity. I'd like to see less line breaks, they come jarringly in the middle of a good phrase and the fire dims a little, for me.
there is a lot of imagery in the arc section that gets kind of muddled. I like the individual images but I feel like they could definitely be cleaned up around the edges. maybe a little more visual separation to make it a little more approachable?
I like the division of this into pieces, but the end of the arc (monday tells me maybe he is right) felt like a really good conclusion to me and continuing from that felt odd. ultimately it's your decision, but it felt less like a profound realization and more like an ending. just something to consider.
sorry this is really choppy & rushed, I don't have a lot of time at the moment & I'm writing this on my phone :/ this is really really good though, as is the rest of your poetry!
feel free to pm me with any questions/for clarification!
thank you for this<33! just what i needed.