a/n: the most specific poem drawing from real life you'll ever get out of me.
The way the veins pop out of my hand
makes it look like I could choke out
my English teacher, no cable wire required.
If only the handwriting it produced
didn't look like it was from
a twelve year old in the Holocaust
(the words of fellow classmates).
It's called motor dysgraphia,
commonly known as laziness,
disorganization, DIY motor skills, or
an excuse for not putting in effort.
A substitute teacher,
self identifying as a Communist,
"chewed" me out. The way he stuttered
and stumbled to me didn't help his point
on how he was a more well rounded human.
Often times it is blamed on my gender,
my upbringing, and body structures.
Yes, the fact that I'm male explains why
I'm only capable of drawing dogs--
right.
It's a car crash or a fight
in the middle of the school;
it's only glorified by ignorance
from outsider views.
Side effects are virtually a skyscraper
supported by all the pity A's
I've received on art projects
or handwritten essays retyped.
It'll be hard growing up
when, no matter what,
I'll still be capturing
the childhood aesthetic.
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
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125,005 Literary Works • 672,798 Reviews
I really enjoyed reading this. It's different, interesting and has real emotion hiding behind every word. You are a very talented writer. I absolutely loved this poem.
This is a really powerful piece of work, I truly admire how you've highlighted this topic - something that many may not even have considered otherwise; raising awareness for DIY motor skills ,and issues associated , in such a creative way. Your poem flows perfectly and the language used is so eloquent. For instance, I really like the first and last stanzas in regard to language - because your points are truly conveyed through it. This is awesome - well done.
This is an amazing topic to bring up. Love it.
Hey! This started out as a comment but then I had too much to say.
I really liked this, the emotion behind it, the subject matter, the pacing... pretty much everything. This is definitely not a cliche subject, and you avoided cliches in all your phrases too. That's pretty impressive by itself.
The little things in here are what really seal the emotion. Like, because of the way you paced and phrased things, I 100% believe that your classmates actually said that your handwriting looks like a 12 year old in the holocaust, and when you put that in parenthesis at the end of that, it really hit home the emotion. If that makes sense.
You really covered the perfect-sized issue. To most people, this subject is rather a little thing, and you don't show it as the most important thing in the world, but you do express how important it is to you in a very balanced way. You round out the issue, clarify it, and bring your emotions about it to the table. The poem isn't too long or short, you use good images, and your opening and closing stanzas have the perfect content for their jobs as openers and closers.
Honestly, I don't have anything much to critique on this.
"are virtually a skyscraper" sounded a little bit strange to me. I think you could pull this from half-simile to straight-up metaphor by just removing "virtually"
So this stanza is fine, but it feels... off. The vagueness of "it" is different from the rest of the poem where it's very clear what you're talking about. And "glorified by ignorance from outsider views" just doesn't have the same impact as pretty much all of the rest of the poem. I like the first two lines, even if they're a little vague, because of their pretty concrete images. When I first read them, I read it as "I am a car crash or a fight..." which I thought was an interesting image that you don't have to use at all, I just thought I'd share.
"self identifying" and "well rounded" I feel like these should have a hyphen?
I'm so glad you made this into a poem and not an essay, because I think the emotion is carried across better here than it could be in an essay.
Excellent poem, Strange. Really solid work. I feel like I understand you (and other people) a little better because of this, and that is always a good purpose for a poem to have!
Keep writing!
~fortis