I’ve made
friends with the shadows,
With their
unmocking words, their silent gaze,
With the
loneliness that oozes from their mangled forms on buildings, roads,
walls.
We speak the same
foreign language,
We play well
together,
Or rather, our
skeletons and invisible backbones play well together.
They are my only
constant companions,
I’m living
with ghosts,
And these are the
most cherished of the bunch.
Those of my hopes
and dreams,
Friends and
family lost,
I’d rather
forget than have to forgive.
I will not falter
under the weight of the forged sins you’ve placed on my
shoulders,
It appears that
the bones have been broken and mended so many times, too many times,
They will not let
me down, again.
It once appeared
that the blackness in your heart,
Complimented the
emptiness in mine,
Until you left too, and now I have no one else to compare myself
against.
Some say it’s
easier to remain forgotten,
Like a sweet
memory no one seems to remember, or a nightmare that woke you from
your fevered sleep,
But it’s
lonely here, and for once, can I just be someone’s first
choice?
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140,459 Literary Works • 673,233 Reviews
Hey Cynder here. Not that you'd like a review, but I have some thoughts, if you don't mind. This was pretty well written for a poem. Most authors mess up so much you can't even really tell what they're talking about. That includes me. So props to you, and now I'll critique.
I think you had an idea for the first two lines, and it just sounded sooo good, you absolutely had to write it down. Then you thought, "Hey, this would be a good poem." So you wrote one. Here's my point, the first part was great, it was fantastic even. Then you lost the groove. Which happens. You had the perfect amount of simplicity and show rather than tell, and then the middle was all tell.
At the end, you went into your own head, and the translation was lost. As a reader, the end just doesn't flow. Put your emotion into your work, yes, but keep the sense factor so that you don't lose your readers. That is a life skill in writing, and very hard to master. However, you'll find that when you do master it, you'll be happier than you've ever been. Now that I've spoken in riddles let's see if I can talk sense.
This is somewhat odd. Maybe you're letting your quirky personality come through and that's fine in that case, but that kinda disappears at the end, with no real transition. You used the phrase "play well together," twice in a row, and I think in this case it doesn't really work. Take the time and nitpick your work. One paragraph at a time.
Don't touch the first one though. I disagree with the other reviewer, I think that it makes it more poetic rather than storytelling. Which is another thing; decide whether you want your peom to be very intuitive and shady, so that the readers just feel everything, or whether you want it to be a journal entry.
In any case, good job friend. Let me know if ya want any help. Cynder out ~
my little itty bitty note is this:
the third line of the first paragraph
"With the loneliness that oozes from their mangled forms on buildings, roads, walls."
it should be:
"With the loneliness that oozes from their mangled forms on buildings, roads and walls."
I don't know much about grammar, though I've read from other reviews there are issues. so apart from that.
good work.
kudos.
keep writing
Hey Bee! Stella here.
Wow, you have some really powerful and unusual images peppering this poem! I found myself reading through it just to see what the next image that struck home would be. I loved your description of the shadows- how their forms are mangled as they're pressed up against different surfaces, I thought that was really clever.
While your imagery really blew me away though, I thought that the whole poem felt a little bit disjointed. I mean you start by talking about the shadows and then nearer the end, we seem to be talking about something totally different. And sometimes that's good in a poem - because of course, in poetry, people are rarely talking about what they appear to be talking about on the surface. But I couldn't really follow the thread of the poem the whole way through here - it jumps to talking in abstract 'you' to a very individual 'you', and then ends on a much more sombre note than it began. Altogether I just thought that the whole thing needed to be a little bit more thematically cohesive for it to make sense the way it should.
There were a few lines which, grammatically, didn't make any sense to me, in particular these:
I had to read these two lines four or five times and even then I was still a bit stuck on what they were supposed to mean.
You obviously have a good eye for unique imagery, and I think that will serve you well! But I think for this poem, and for future poems, you really need to think about what you are trying to get that imagery to say, and let it tell a simpler story.
Hope I helped, drop me a note if you need anything!
-Stella x