Published October 9, 2011
***I wrote this poem to be spoken word (I'm reading it at a poetry slam)***
Out there
In the World,
The Darkness is closing in.
We know of it,
But we do not know it.
Out there,
Beyond our carefully constructed walls,
There are little ones crying.
They call out to us,
And we pretend to hear,
But we do not.
Out there,
In that place,
They cry out to anyone,
But we do not listen,
For they are the Others,
The Not-Us.
And we do not help.
Out there,
In the Not-Here,
The pain goes on and on,
Unceasing and inescapable.
It is the pain of the Not-Heard.
Now, please, tell me this:
"Why did God feel the need to create a Hell?
It seems so redundant."*
*The part in quotes is an excerpt from The Curse of the Wendigo, by Rick Yancey
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I don't think I am going to give you a review that is longer then the poem so here we go. It was a very good poem, now there could be improvements that I even need to work on like imagery. Imagery I think sets off someone's poem because the reader can feel like there in the poem. Use more similes this helps them compare it with other things they are more use to. Be more indirect this helps to.
Keep up the writing.
Hope this helped.
Since you wrote this to be spoken-word, I read this out loud as I read it. I think I can review it if I just... keep... reading it out loud.
First off, my overall impression: this is cool. I can't possibly get your inflection or anything right, especially as I don't know in which mind you wrote this, but just hearing it out loud is cool. What I might say is to cut down on the commas and pauses; while it's important to have pauses apparent in any work you intend to read aloud at first, and then second as a written work and only second, commas are the ancient marking signifying "pause here, take a breath." The way it's written down looks like it's telling the speaker to hyperventilate, breathing after nearly every-single-line, and I'll say that it's perfectly okay to have your lines of poetry run into one another. That's what I do sometimes, when something sounds cooler spoken aloud. I still edit it for it to be on paper, and I keep the pauses in my head, somewhat.
I'm not going to review this stanza-by-stanza because it is spoken-word, and because it's not meant to go stanza-by-stanza or line-by-line but idea-by-idea. I will, however, say that in the third stanza - the full stop after "Not-Us" is telling the reader/speaker to pause longer, where it might suffer a shorter pause to only mildly separate the two ideas. Now, I couldn't manage to read this out loud while honouring all of the commas or pauses, simply because it flows better without too much punctuation. People will pause at a line break, even when a line break doesn't say pause.
At the end, there's an abrupt shift in the viewpoint and the story-telling and everything that I can't even rectify with the idea that you're to read this out loud and not in your head. It just feels odd that you should suddenly shift from saying things about the pain in the Not-Here, and then you go on to quote the Curse of the Wendigo, telling the listener-reader to answer a question for you. It's a sudden jolt from unreality, and I'm not quite sure if I like it.
Overall, though, awesome.