Lay my body across damp logs,
bound by rope that is thinning.
Pour the half-filled jug of kerosene,
in my eyes and
in my mouth.
Take a lighter to damp clothes,
that attach to my body
like another layer of skin.
You can catch the ashes from the air
like lightning bugs dancing above the grass
and underneath the moonlight
on summer nights.
Cup them in your hands until they are
filled to the brim and
starting to slip through your fingers.
You could fill a jar with them,
poke holes through a thin layer of coffee filter
to pretend that I'm still breathing.
On a callused and barren tree stump,
you could try and piece me back together again
like in the nursery rhymes,
(the ones where they were never able to).
My body is a puzzle that even I
don't know how to put back together;
(I guess I'll look at the cardboard box I came in.)
The wind whisks the ashes away, scattering them,
and I know I couldn't keep you here
even if I tried.
No amount of tape or glue
are able to hold me together.
But when the sky shatters,
I will tend to it with scotch tape and hope
that it stops the sun's bleeding.
I'm just trying to make things
how they used to be;
I know this'll never be.
But sometimes I go back to the
memory-stained carpet
and fingerprint-smeared walls.
And sometimes, I go back to the
old souvenirs from our relationship that hide in the closet,
and all the crappy love poems I wrote but never sent--
wait.
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
Are you sure you want to delete this comment? This cannot be undone.
Mark this comment as a review? Points will be awarded to the poster.
Your comment was posted, but it wasn’t long enough to count as a review. Reviews need about four complete sentences (at least 250 characters). Try writing another review that explains your thoughts in more detail — the author will appreciate it, and you’ll earn points for it.
125,007 Literary Works • 672,816 Reviews
Ayyyy good poetry. Notes as per usual so you get the gist of the analysis.
Immediate missed opportunity to specify the log says my style says my style says my style. If they don't know what kind of log it is, they can't know what kind of existential longing the narrator has. hah. this all feels very ceremonious as if it's done in a dream or a recurring thought or train of self-hate from the narrator. hm.
comparing the morbidity of catching ashes to the innocence of catching fireflies is brilliant and i love you for it, but also it's morbid and i love you for it. in this final line--do they just slip through? i feel like there's more here, like they should speak to the person. after all, they've already taken on lives of their own. it's not a stretch to say there's more.
nothing special about 'you could fill...i'm still breathing.' that should say something.
humpty dumpty goes in a nice direction when the ashes come back into play and scatter a second, third time, but the bleeding sun image comes from nowhere and i want it to be prepared to badly. make it so for me.
Aaaand I ended up putting reviews in the notes. There you go. <3
Ty
I went to look at your poems after talking to you in the chat, and I am glade I talked to you because this was amazing, It was just good. If I were too look alot into it, I could find mistakes, but that dosent really matter with this poem, it was so good, it made me think I really loved it. I loved the last stanza (is that what they are called? especially the first few lines. and the second one was really nicely descriped. all the stanzas they work well together.
So that is a big thumbs up from me
Thank you! And yes, they're called stanzas, haha.
Im write for once