Today

Hey, Storm! VegasLights here to give you a review. You do not know how much I love reading your poems, so this is a happy day!

Onto the actual poem, I think it is wonderful. There are a couple of things that I happened to notice while reading your poem. The length of some of the lines, I think are too long. They just stick out there, you know? I have no issue with it, I just think it would be better to shorten those lines out a bit.

Your poem shows a good theme and situation, but the flow doesn't really work with it. While reading your poem I felt as if it kind of bounced back and forth. It was good in most of your stanzas, but in some, it was just choppy. I mean no offense to you at all, trust me, you are a brilliant writer!

There were some punctuation and grammar errors, but I don't know if you are a grammar freak like me, so I will just leave that part out. You being you, I feel like if you wanted and needed to find the errors you could. Again, no offense I'm just saying you're a skilled writer, but I have a weird way of putting it.

Some of the things that you said just didn't make sense, but that is what made your poem special. I don't know how to explain it, but it just spoke to me (I guess it is because I don't make that much sense either XD.)

The structure of your poem was great, but that didn't suit the flow. I think if you changed some of the words you chose it would fit the flow and structure a lot more.

Overall, I really liked your poem and I feel like it could have been worded differently. I mean it is brilliant like all of your poems, it just needs a bit of tweaking. Your imagery was great, and I really enjoyed it. I saw what you were saying and that is what I like the most about poems. Sadly, all reviews must come to an end and here is the end of this one. I thank you for your time and I hope you have a great day!

~Keep Writing!~
VegasLights
(Previously Steam1244)

I like how your poem is very realistic. But, I have several suggestions. firstly, the rhythm is a bit off and the rhyme is sometimes happening and sometimes not. Maybe, you should try some poems without rhyme and see if you like it. Also, the punctuation and capitalisation could be added correctly to help the reader understand when to take a "breath" or when a new sentence is starting. You could also work on the line breaks. Your word choice is sometimes a bit off. In the tornado part of it, you said that you argued with your stepfather instead. Instead of what? Instead of the tornado? It's a bit confusing. The same or similar thing happened in other parts of your poem as well. Why is there a fish tank in the basement? When I think of basement, I think of dark and cold, why would you sleep there if you could just use a fan? I am also confused by the marker thigh, leg part. Are you trying to tell the reader that one of your legs is bigger than the other? Or are you talking about the marker? If you are talking about your leg, why is one bigger than the other? Did you draw on your leg? Those parts can be confusing for the reader. You can also add more detail. I love how you made the reader feel the cold and pain of the sunburn, but what are you trying to talk about. Is it just a typical day? Do the shorts have some important part in the poem? Why are Summer days "dead days"? If they are a good thing, maybe you could give them a more appealing "name" Like, "warm days" or something. That way, the reader will also feel the want to experience summer. What do you mean by combining them into one average leg? Are you going to have surgery to fuse your legs together into one?

I really liked your poem and I hope my review helps!

Storm. <3

Diving right in with a belief that you'll appreciate brevity and professionalism, I think your length betrays you. After a couple of stanzas that feel self-contained without the connective sinew of motif and theme, the poem showcases a lack of togetherness, and it displays what was perhaps a lack of forethought in construction. See, you have powerful sentiment in the end, but you have powerful motif in the beginning. The two do not intertwine. See the issue?

My suggestion for this is to take and dissect and scramble a bit so you have the ligaments of the shorts and sunburn motif to take us through to the end (which I believe perhaps should come sooner if we burn some fat, honestly) and you get the meat of the ending, powerful sentiments (or really from middle to end is where you hit your groove mentality-wise) throughout the entire piece. This is a strong, but labor-intensive, solution.

Flow-wise, it does not feel very fluid, and for this I suggest a breathing exercise as per usual. Four seconds inhale, two seconds hold, four seconds exhale. Once you reach this controlled breathing, follow the poem as best you can and try to match the fluidity of your breathing with line breaks, punctuation, and all markings of soft-stops and hard-stops. This majorly improves flow in most cases that follow through with the weird experiment.

Finally, your parenthetical lines are your strongest and they need to come forward. Perhaps the parentheses make them powerful. Perhaps they diminish them. An experiment is in order, and I'd like to see the outcome. I'd also like to see a much denser version of this.

Hope the notes help,
Ty