Young Writers Society

I really enjoyed this poem! I like how you write that decomposition is the emotions that can kill. Like decomposition, overwhelming emotions can destroy someone from the inside-out, making them unrecognizable to those around them, until they are nothing but an empty husk.

I wonder if this someone is bleeding from the maggots eating away at their flesh? I would like to see this in the poem.

Overall, I’d say that this was very lovely to read. I wish you an amazing day/night.

Hey there! Plume here, with a review!

Ooh, this was another great poem from you! As both a bio and poetry nerd, I loved the intersection between the two you drew in this poem. As always, I absolutely adored your imagery and word usage in this—those last four lines are absolutely gorgeous.

One thing I enjoyed was the way the poem felt... detached, in a way. I'm not sure if you've ever heard of those fungi that can hijack ants and sort of turn them into zombies, but that was what I kind of had in mind as I was reading. The overall narrative felt like an exploration of both burnout and also depression in a way, but both focused on that sort of helpless, wasting-away feeling that happens in both of them. The speaker sounded tired throughout and almost resigned to the disintegration and their ultimate decomposition. I thought that the speaker's low (or even lack of) energy contrasted well with the images of this thriving fungus that's essentially "feeding" on the speaker—it turned it into this parasite that I thought was a really nice feature. I especially liked the descriptions of it in the third and fourth stanzas; you did an excellent job of visually showing the decomposition of the speaker and the thriving fungus.

I also liked the almost circular ending you had; the subtle change from "i fear that i am wasting" to "i am wasting" gave the poem a nice, yet depressive, finality, and the difference between the more human "fungal emotions" versus full on "decomposition" also added to that nice finality while also calling back the first lines. (I also just really love patterns in poetry and I thought you executed it nicely here.)

One thing that might be interesting to explore is seeing if the poem could decompose itself, in some way. I found that it seemed very composed for something about decay. It could be interesting to play around with the physical shape of the poem, or even doing something with sentence structure to show decay both in the subject and form of the poem. This is by no means a requirement, but it could be interesting to play around with, and also add even more unique choices.

Overall: nice work!! I think you used some wonderful language choices here to build a quite interesting poem. I hope to read more of your work soon! Feel free to ask any further questions; I'd be happy to answer them! Until next time!