Penned

Hey Sophia146,

This is Aley, and I'm here to review your poem.

First off I'd like to say that I really love the tone you used in this poem. It's very conversational and displays a good use of words as you meander through the metaphor that you've created between the ending of pain and either death or acceptance, whichever your reader decides to interpret.

That being said, I do think that you have some work you can do. The main thing I see here is the lines. You've got a lot of lines that are an awkward length for the size of YWS's page, and whether this was intentional or not, it sort of makes the poem look jumbled. If you're doing this to be like Walt Whitman, I think you've hit some of the nails on the head, but overall the affect is lost because of the size of our pages, and you should trim the lines to actually end, or indent where needed to create the notion of it belonging on the line above it.

I'd also say that this poem is rather typical in terms of poems about pain. You have a lot of things that just about anyone could write and say so I'd like to see a little more originality in your descriptive language to better emphasize the individuality of your speaker along with providing your speaker with the ability to really express their emotions and why they're feeling this way.

In summary, I think you've got a good start on what to write but you need to spend a little bit more time exploring different options with your lines, punctuation, capitalization, and detail. Once you get that down, I think you'll have a lot better outcome. To improve this one, I'd suggest you try playing around with creating better lines first since you have such a wide variety here and decide how you want to handle end punctuation because a lot of your lines have periods at the end, but enjambment is beautiful in poetry. End-stops are often halting and that comes across here especially when you seem to be forcing the lines to be lengthy just to encompass entire sentences. I personally think that makes it look a little odd because usually lines and sentences are two separate entities entirely in poetry.

Since you're new, I think there is a link that can really benefit you here on the site. It's got all sorts of tips and tricks for poetry, so please check it out. It's the index to the poetry articles here on YWS! Poetry Tutorials Article Index

I hope this helped
-Aley

Wow. As someone who has personally experienced the numbness and fatigue of depression, and as a writer, I think you capture both with exquisite accuracy. I love your comparison of yourself and your emotions to a pen gradually running out of ink. As I am also a huge fan of freestyle poetry, I love the varied rhythm and lack of rhyme.

This is an incredibly potent poem for me to read. I've struggled with depression since I was a child, and a lot of people think depression is being consistently sad. Well, it may start like that, but when it becomes truly destructive it is because you have numbed yourself to that sadness. You feel empty and hollow and that's when you wish you simply didn't exist. Some people even cut themselves in their desperation to feel something, anything. "I am numb. I feel nothing, do nothing…am nothing." This is so frank and very accurate.

You go on to portray an almost half-hearted confusion as to why getting rid of the bad leaves you with nothing. This is also very potent and very true. I've been through it. I often write in the hopes of ridding myself of some of my negative emotion, and that's when we get to "With each word written, I advance closer and closer to depletion." Very honest.

You have a simplistic, straightforward way of writing this that really gets your message across. I'm sorry, I'm usually really good at giving constructive criticism, but this time I can't really think of any. You've made me emotional with this, and that's a difficult thing to do anymore. Thank you. I can't imagine you would be able to write this without personal experience, and if that is so I'm sorry for what you've been through and I hope you can find the strength and beauty that comes from making your way through it. I wish you hope and light and I hope you keep writing, because this shows you have really great talent and potential.

Thank you for sharing.

I really like this poem. It shows how even if you write out pages of your emotions, if they don't hold value, then they are empty. It also shows that people have multiple sides of themselves, depending on how they feel, and each side thinks and acts differently.

"For just as the ink leaves the silver tool and enters its line-filled destination, emotions leave my body in a way similarly so."
This is my favorite line of the whole poem because I could actually see this happening. I could see someone writing and the emotions leaving their body, leaving them empty in the process.

"Scrawled messages are inscribed hastily, as if rushing the process could somehow delay the inevitable."
I like this line as well because of the fact that so many people could relate to this. I can see someone writing quickly, as if their life depended on it. Sometimes I even write like that.

All and all, this is really good. Keep on writing. This is relate-able, and so powerful.