The ocean is wide and vast,
like the fragile skin that stretches across your crooked teeth.
What you lack in spine you make up in loud words and careful craft,
I gather my guts and begin to fall apart like the cracked flowers of a wreath.
~
Lay my aching body down in the shallows.
Let the waves carry me home to my watery grave.
Your love is as heavy as the cinder block tied to my feet,
dragging me down and sinking me.
Becoming another half-buried and forgotten shipwreck,
off the rocky shores of our softly bruised necks.
~
Breathe me and taste the salt on my cold lips,
a lover’s demise eclipsed.
I’m starting to feel like quite the waste of a perfectly good set of bones.
You flooded my lungs with water and on my chest rested twelve stones,
And sat watching as my ribs gave out and as my mouth never gave in to the words you so desperately wanted to hear.
~
Now I’m haunting your head and those tangled sheets in your bed.
A fleeting whisper waiting for someone to lend an ear.
Our weathered love and regrets linger as blemishes on our skin until we finally disappear,
but I think we’ve already drowned in an ocean full of our deepest fears.
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
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Original Text:
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125,008 Literary Works • 672,831 Reviews
Hello again, Chilow here. There seems to be a pattern forming of me reading your poetry and then being at an utter loss for words by the end. Really, you're that good at the imagery (If you hadn't gathered from my last review, I'm a big fan of imagery xD)
Within just the very first stanza, the first few lines even, I'm having a hard time keeping my jealousy to myself when I compare my own amateur work to yours.
"The ocean is wide and vast,
like the fragile skin that stretches across your crooked teeth.
What you lack in spine you make up in loud words and careful craft,
I gather my guts and begin to fall apart like the cracked flowers of a wreath." ----- Good lord! This is rather making me think of people like Poe and King with your descriptors. I'm more than a little biased, though, with my love of similes and comparisons within poetry, so I might come off as a a bit of a boot-licker here, but honestly you need to publish this! One can only imagine the events that could create such emotion and raw feeling in this poem, and of course that only adds to the overall readability of it. A poem, or any literary work for that matter, should not only be judged by its ability to make a reader immerse themselves in the story being told, but also by its long term affect on that reader. I know for a fact that I'll be thinking about this poem for a while to come, so both thank you and congrats on your incredible work!
Oh my god. I'm seriously at a loss of words, thank you so much!! I think you just made my whole entire life with your kind words. I really appreciate you taking the time to read and review my poems. I don't know what else to say but thank you so very much again!!!
This is Yams here for a review!
I really enjoyed the imagery in this poem. You were quite creative in your imagery. It made the poem's tone feel eeire or odd. I've never thought of an ocean and thought of a body before.
The lines are really long and feel sort of more like prose than poetry, but I'll touch more on that later in the review.
The first simile you make with the fragile skin is quite odd and it feels off to compare it to a sea, but it does make it have this odd tone to it. The third and fourth line seem more like separate lines to me, so I'd suggest putting a period after "craft" and starting a new sentence.
In the fifth line, "becoming" feels like an awkward way to start the sentence.
One of the poem's flaws is that it uses a lot of figurative language making the poem's theme or meaning harder to get across. I really love your imagery, but it starts to become a bunch of pretty metaphors and similes meshed into a poem together where the reader doesn't always know how to interpret some of the lines. Specifically, the last two lines of the stanza I just talked about. You want to make sure that you have enough of everything but not too much. It feels very description heavy in this poem and shines over everything else.
This is what was talked about when I was talking about long lines. You stray off into a line so far that it goes off the line itself. It would be nice if you chopped each part into smaller sentences and into more stanzas.
Personally in this situation, I disagree with AliceAfternoon about how there are no stanzas. You had put the "~" thing with marks in between stanzas because of the formatting correct? If not, yeah, put it into stanzas if you can with the formatting of the Publishing Center.
Have a great day!
Hey I'm here to review your poem :3
Immediately I noticed your poems main issues, long lines, no stanzas, and incorrect punctuation. So I'm going to correct it for you and then after correcting the main issues, I'll talk about the story and other things.
long lines
I have the same problem as you. Sometimes I don't know how to break up my lines and I just tend to write really long lines. It's perfectly fine to break up a line in the middle of a sentence, as long as you don't put a comma at the end.
no stanzas
I think your poem is lacking stanzas. I think with a poem of this length (and it's this long before you break up the lines) it is necessary to have stanzas. It really improves the look of the poem and helps the reader read clearly.
incorrect punctuation
When using punctuation in poems, it's the same as using it in like an essay or novel. If you put a comma at the end of a line, the next line with not be capitalized. Also try not to end ever line with a comma because it makes the whole poem one long run on. Also it's okay to end a sentence and start a new one in one line.
Now reading your poem I love your writing style. The metaphors and imagery were really good. I think the one critique have is that I think the last line would be better: "but I think we've already drowned in an ocean of out deepest fears". It sounds better and makes more sense.
Anyway I hope this review was helpful,
Have a wonderful day,
Alice
Thank you for your advice, I really appreciate it and hopefully my poem looks a bit better now.