I guess there’s no name of a tale like this
When I’m not on a paper
Or in a tin box
Where someone without a heart
Keeps whatever humans express
In daily conversations
In melodies
In lullabies
In books
But some tales
Don’t always require a publisher
Because its not there yet
To be turned into pots of gold
That only the men desire and consume for themselves
In a story I heard
Some southern girl in Kansas
Found a way into a bright
Colorful
Fantastical worlds
With misunderstood lions
Tin man
No hearts or bars to hold
And the little ones
That skitter across the golden bridge
And fly colors into the sky
While the wicked witch goes under
As the heroes end in happy ever afters
Brighter than ever before
But did the lion ever mention
That when the day turns to night
And the girl goes into slumber
That the world turns from bright to blight?
Did the rabbit in the hole
Tell Alice that
The real hole in the ground
Was the one she imagined all along
To put herself against the queen
That had nothing to do with her?
Did the rabbits ever tell her the times they were cooked into stew
Or taken as property
Or even had times like Alice
Where they dared to wish into psychedelic mania
Flew under the ground
Forgot the pieces that made them true
And let the colors talk for them
And not for themselves?
Let’s put in into another perspective
I guess I am Alice too
I imagine things too much
To my own lack of sanity
I been trained to love fairy tales
More than I like the real world
Ew but like
I love to be in a hole
Have a caterpillar pressure me into smoking hookahs
And kill the queen
And cry stupidly
And be seen in a movie
Unlike mine
But I guess I would also
Take a syringe and take the rabbits blood
And then after that horrible deed
Drink myself into blindness
And lack of sobriety
Throwing the rest of the hollow body
In ditches instead
But then
It would be against my morals
Because I don’t ever think
Of doing that anyways
I’ve probably cried more times for animals
Than actual people so
Rabbit killing wouldn’t be the best choice anyways
The point is
I don’t know why my life isn’t a fairytale
But then I think
“Well then I wouldn’t be alive.”
Because I would muck around too much
To the point of the end of my existence
I would fall in holes
Just to get out with broken bones
Instead of funny tasting drinks
And rocking chairs
At least I am not in Kansas being brought into by natural disasters
And singing happy songs
When I know everything isn’t all well
I guess I’ll stick to big girl tales instead
And maybe
Just maybe
I would forget about fairy tales
And live in a dystopian warzone instead
THE END
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125,005 Literary Works • 672,797 Reviews
Hi Purple67! Dropping by to give you a review. I don't normally review lyrics, or poetry in general, mostly because I feel that I cannot give good feedback on it besides some generic commentary. I still struggle with that, but I will do my best here. It seems that Peng, who is amazing by the way, gave you some great feedback already, and she essentially put everything I was thinking into words, so I hope you checked that review out. With that said, I'll focus my review more-so on my general thoughts on this.
Here's any grammatical nitpicks I noticed while reading:
Did you mean "for a tale like this"?
it's*
Just one world, so remove the plural s.
Just one lion, right? Also, it would flow better if you added more to the "tin man" line. Try "and a tin man" or something similar.
I think that you should expand on this line and remove the "ew" because it ruins the flow of this and feels like a cheap way to get around expressing the narrator's disgust. Show us, don't tell us.
rabbit's*
So, as Peng pointed out, I think this poem would benefit greatly from some adjustments to your line breaks. Think about well-known poems from well-known poets, study how they arrange the words into lines, play around with this and try merging some of these phrases together. It would help with the flow and the way the reader reads the poem.
As for the poem itself, I really enjoyed it (though I'm biased because I absolutely love Alice in Wonderland). I liked the comparisons you drew between the narrator, Alice, and Dorothy. I could feel the narrator's emotions through your writing, their frustration and their desire to be free and to do what they wanted to do. Your use of imagery was good and added depth to your narrator's voice, allowing the reader more insight into how they were feeling.
I especially liked these two lines quite a bit:
This has a lot of potential and I hope that you continue to work on it and take in the feedback that was provided to you. Continue writing and working hard. I wish you the best of luck.
~ Iggy
Hi Purple67,
You have a really clear voice here that is striving to be heard through the many lines of this poem. At it's core, your poem is trying very hard to speak something I think you're feeling really strongly inside. I don't think it is currently succeeding to do that in an effective way.
You have a lot of line breaks that aren't doing very much for your poem at the moment. You may find that by 'tidying' up your poem by tightening your lines so that you're only keeping the images that speak to you the loudest you will take out a lot of line breaks. If you want to keep the breaks then I think you need to be bolder by making some stanzas. At the moment the run-on feeling of your poem is not effective because the line breaks don't have a structure, which means that the reader starts and stops a lot. If you use stanzas to break up your poem into moments - or concepts - this will help ground your reader and gives the lines a sense of purpose and movement attached to the significance of each stanza.
You also have several lines that aren't keeping your concept clear. For example "Drink myself into blindness/And lack of sobriety" doesn't need to have the second line - it muddies the waters of your image and explains what your reader doesn't need explained because your image (the figurative drinking until you're blind) works already to clearly tell us what you want to say.
You have mixed Alice in Wonderland (bunny etc) and Wizard of Oz (tin man, lion etc) which works because these stories are both about young women experiencing growth and change in their lives in ways that are difficult to explain verbally. You use some good imagery and language to explore those concepts in your longer and more considered lines.
You may want to be clear for yourself what the *intent* of your poem is - why have you written this, what was the key message. At the moment, due to the issues I've raised above, the message of your poem isn't clear.
As always, poetry is deeply subjective, so if you don't agree with me, that's okay too!
Good luck on any editing you choose to do. If I am still around when/if you post an edit, I'd love to see it.
-Pen
I love Alice in Wonderland! This poem took so much from that and made it even more awesome - a little more sad, too.
I really like your style - short and sweet and the sentences are kind of fractured, but it still makes sense. It's really unique and I haven't seen it in a while.
Hey also welcome back.
How so? How did I take it on that called to you? But I always loved Alice in Wonderland sort of because I just like to imagine I'm Alice and looking through the trippy rabbit holes. I never understood why the queen hated Alice so much, either.
But considering rabbits somehow in real life can be made into stew, that is where some of the stuff came from. Also, I do think The Wizard of Oz could unironically be an horror story. Just saying.
Hmm to answer your question I'm not really sure? I think just taking the story and twisting it in kind of a dark way with the rabbit stew was interesting. The way it transitions into fairy tales to darker things like dystopians, and the way it was like, "did they ever tell her _______?" reflected on the darker light behind the stories in a way I thought was really cool. Sorry I don't know if that makes sense XD
Ooh I never thought of that before, but The Wizard of Oz does sound like a horror story.