Dead Love

Hey there Swottielottie. I found a couple of your poems that never got a second review and after taking a glance through, it seems I'm going to try and review more than a few of them.

A focus on romance is apparent in the pieces that I've seen so far but not in a way that feels toxic. 2007 was not a good vintage for healthy relationships, judging from all of the material I've read over the past year. You start with the simple little phrase of "dead love". To me, this could mean a lot of things but with the involvement of the candles, I'm reading it as a love that burned out vibe. There's plenty of other ways to go with the phrase, this is just the assumption I'm choosing to get the review done.

Our love was a thousand candles
burning inside us.
It lit us up and warmed our souls, like a
fire from within.

This is the strongest point of imagery that I saw within the entire poem. I know that the entire message is most likely built around the candles/the burning, but it loses momentum with the more that you use it. We have the starter point of imagery but then there's no more consistent details added until the readers get down to this section:

But you ruined it.
You put out the candles, threw water
on the fire;

Here we moved into the slow burning love turning to just be quickly extinguished love. This portion helps to pick up the in between spots but that shouldn't be how the poem sounds. The reader shouldn't just be jumping around through random sentiment until they find a strong line that interest them, only to fall back into the mix. I'm not trying to be cruel with my critique, I'm just trying to show you how this architecture will eventually fall apart for you.

A poem like this does need a few down moments for the reader to catch their breath but we need some more fast and strong feelings.

What we had you killed,
no funeral or sorrow.
Just
Dead love...

Now as much as I love a good ellipsis trailing off into the darkness to signal emptiness, this is just not cutting it for me. I think with all of the pieces that you were finally building on, the strong imagery from the narrator's partner "killing" their relationship, this ending is far too sudden. We just sort of stop when the story is getting good.

I think you could trail off with these two lines but there needs a bit more substance before the readers hit that point. I would never normally recommend for someone to extend the piece that they were writing. This feels like a case where it needs to be done for proper expression, and for sorting the words better together.

And I think that's all I've got for now.
Good job and good luck.
- lizz <3