Your brain, your shoes
Your eyes, what to choose?
Everything with you lies at fault.
Your aggression’s the result of your manic depression
And you aren’t even hard to insult
Your’s transcript’s the worst
I really have seen it
Says here you’re disabled
Think that they mean it?
Your lying’s pathological
Your mind is archaic
Your hygiene’s mythological
Your friends are barbaric
Your future is doomed
Your past is flawed
Your present is screwed
You’re nought but a fraud
If I were you I’d just give up now.
The most fearsome thing you can take is a sow.
You’re unworthy, of this you’re aware
Never able to collect the treasure
The treasure contained in the lair
One of you will be killed in battle.
The rest haunted by the sound of his rattle
On the way home one more must leave
Forever stained with the blood on his sleeve
One disappears from the Fog of all Souls
His body battered and riddled with holes
One is carried away to Treaugh
Pulled from a realm of ice and snow
And the last?
The last must suffer the lack of his friends
Never allowed to make his amends
Your companions shall die
Leaving you to ask why
So heed our words young weary pioneers
Heed our words or you may have just drunk your last beers
*Guild notes on this text*
This song is believed to be a prophecy issued to a group of mercenaries and their employers; a group Riders of the Dawn. The prophecy was issued to them on the quest for the Staff of Ancient Souls. As the story goes, they were lost in the wilderness (their guide having just been brutally murdered by a gnome bard) and they unknowingly gained directions from the Great Sage of Tlelk in exchange for hearing a song from his group of bards. He tricked them into accepting this prophecy and allowed for the deaths of four of the mercenaries. It seems the last verse is related to the drinks the Sage gave the adventurers before luring them into their untimely demises.
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140,298 Literary Works • 673,080 Reviews
Hi there Cidrian! I saw your poem's been in the green room for a while, so I thought I'd drop by with a review for you to bump it out, courtesy of review day :)
General comments / suggestions / likes
My main critique for this poem is on continuity -> specifically, continuity of who exactly the audience is. (If that sounds complicated and weirdly worded, I promise it isn't!) What I mean by that is that the poem goes from feeling like it's addressing one particular person, to feeling like it's addressing a group of people/friends. For example, at the start of the poem, we have:
Which to me sounds very much like it's talking about one single individual; a singular someone with one brain, and a singular someone who is "aggressive".
However, later in the poem, this has changed slightly:
By using the phrase "one of you", you make it sound much more like a group of people is being addressed. For me, this causes a bit of confusion; is the narrator talking to and criticizing one individual, or a group of people?
So, my main suggestion would be to look at the continuity of the audience (hopefully what that means makes more sense now!)
With that out of the way, there's still a lot about this poem I like! One thing I really enjoyed was your diction; your vocabulary and use of language is really strong, and helps to paint vivid images in the reader's mind. One passage I feel uses especially strong descriptions is this one:
(Admittedly, it is a bit violent but you convey the violent images quite effectively!)
I really like the phrase "haunted by the sound of his rattle" -> the combination of the phrases haunted + rattle are very, well, haunting ;)
More specific comments / nitpicks
I'd suggest putting a comma after "shoes" here, since "your brain, your shoes / Your eyes" is meant to be read as a list. The comma would help clearly show that the narrator is deliberating between three items, instead of it feeling like "your shoes Your eyes" are somehow one thing.
Ooh, "manic depression" is an oxymoron - I'm a huge fan of those!
Just a very small typo: "Your's" -> "Your"
I also wanted to point out that in poetry (and especially in song-writing), "really" is a fairly weak word and acts more as filler than anything else. Especially in a situation like this; there's absolutely no difference between having seen something and having "really" seen something ;) Even something like Trust me, I've seen it would be a bit stronger as it doesn't use "really". That's also just something to keep in mind for any poetry-writing in the future - fillers words like really are generally good to avoid! (It's kind of ironic for me to be saying that, because I know I say "really" a lot in reviews and in texting, but it just means I'm extra careful to avoid it in poetry hehe!)
This is an absolute bonanza of really strong adjectives; I love it!
The repetition of "the treasure" feels very unnecessary here - I understand that it's because you want "lair" to be at the end of the second line, for rhyming purposes, however as a rule of thumb it's NEVER worth it to sacrifice the impact of a poem to fit the rhyming scheme. I think it'd be more effective for you to do something like this:
Unable to steal the treasure from the lair
(You'll notice I swapped out a couple words, ex never able -> unable, collect -> steal; that's just so the line doesn't become significantly more unwieldy than the rest.)
This way, the repetition would be cut out and two lines would be shortened to one (more concise is generally a good thing in poetry, as you want to say everything you have to say but still keep the reader engaged. And shorter generally = more engaging! So if you ever think some parts of the poem are unnecessary/not adding to the meaning/not contributing to the effect, I'd almost always suggest cutting those out!), while still keeping the same meaning.
^Same goes for this; I'd suggest consolidating it into And the last must suffer the lack of his friends.
Super duper small but I'd suggest putting a comma at the end of this line just so it feels more finished!
All in all, this was an intriguing poem and I like that it has some backstory / doesn't just exist in a void! I hope my suggestions were helpful and if anything doesn't make sense feel free to ask for clarification :)
Keep writing!
whatcha
Thanks for the review! And, if it helps, the poem's real weird because I originally wrote the first couple verses addressing one person, and then realized I could change it a little to fit an rpg adventure (also the reason for the violence). And thank you, so much, for all the poem writing advice, because this is the first poem I've ever written in my life, and I honestly didn't think it would be any good. So, to be very redundant, thanks!
Hey there!
I like use of 2nd person. It really gets me into the character role that this poem is talking about, and I always like when that happens. I don't really have much to say about that, but that's something that made me enjoy this poem more than I would if it were just a regular 3rd person of 1st person poem.
The rhymes do feel a bit forced, and I'm not really seeing a pattern, though it may be there. It goes from rhyming to not rhyming a lot, so that might be why I'm stuck on seeing a pattern. I do think there is one, but I'm not finding it easy to follow along.
The notes on the text are interesting, but I feel like readers need to have read something beforehand in your universe to really understand, and since I haven't, it doesn't all come together like it probably should. That's all my fault though, as I'm just here to free you from The Green Room, but when I have time, I'll try to take a look around to understand more.
Overall, this got me feeling like the people mentioned in the notes, and as I said before, I always enjoy when that happens, so this is a good poem in my opinion.
Best,
Max
It's totally understandable that it's really confusing. Because a lot of the stuff it mentions I've written elsewhere or only told to a few people. Also, like I told Whatcha, I wrote the first couple verses about one person, and then shifted the last few to a group of fake people. So, your confusion is totally on me and no one else. Thanks for the review by the way!
I like how it started with "you, you, you" but quickly it became about the death and tragedy of others. The last two lines were a very fulfilling and a sick way to end it and I loved that:
"So heed our words young weary pioneers
Heed our words or you may have just drunk your last beers"
I like how quickly this escalates. It goes from a diss track to a prophecy of death, which is great.
"Your brain, your shoes
Your eyes, what to choose?
Everything with you lies at fault.
Your aggression’s the result of your manic depression
And you aren’t even hard to insult"
This is my favorite part. ^^ The flow is really good and it rolls off the tongue.
"...a group Riders of the Dawn." Did you mean "...a group called Riders of the Dawn"?
"It seems the last verse is related to the drinks the Sage gave the adventurers before luring them into their untimely demises." Being drunk is always a common theme in your writing. Iconic