“How are you?”
My life is an endless void of destruction that is bearing down on my shoulders like the world did on Atlas, but I can’t complain because someone has it worse somewhere, people are dying so it doesn’t matter if I only feel like I am.
My eyes can only look but not see because my vision has been tainted with scenes of mediocrity that I am not allowed to obtain. Perfection is key but I can’t even find the lock oh I must keep searching for answers to questions I can’t remember.
My feet are blistered with indecision and caked with regret from walking down all the wrong roads, trying to follow the path to success while also being a trailblazer myself. I’m not sure where I’m going but I doubt I’ll get there soon.
My hands no longer shake from anxiety; it is merely habitual patterns that are ingrained in my being, I’ve been writing the same sentence for four years and it hasn’t stopped being true yet.
My throat is dry from the greetings I must always have prepared when meeting my future, my voice does not quake with nervousness but now is flat with lack of passion: it’s not because I want it to, its because it has to.
My dreams are haunted with the same nightmare every time, a piece of paper slicing right through my heart and shredding every ounce of hard work and dedication as it goes. A boy I once knew is in a mental institution now with this same diagnosis: failure.
“Oh, I’m fine.”
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125,005 Literary Works • 672,804 Reviews
This is Kaos here for a review!
I see that this is prose poetry and that's something that always interests me, so let's jump right into this. The repetition is something that I actually didn't mind with this poem starting the same on each stanza as it feels like it fits well but I do think it could become stronger with work and revisions. The first thing that I wanted to tackle about this is that it tends to get rambly throughout a lot of this, being prose-poetry and I think it loses its way with it going on and on. Instead of doing this and letting it become a mess I think you can confine ideas to your stanzas and kind of restrict it so that it doesn't end up spilling all over the place and instead you focus more on the start of each stanza.
Give the poem more of a focus and more of a direction in where it's going and the reader will be able to feel that too. I wanted to tackle the navel-gazing in this poem and it happens to do a lot of it. I think that this is the greatest weakness of the poem with it being so self-indulged that it starts to become muddled in that and we don't really see anything outside of the speaker's thoughts, which is something that tends to happen a lot. I'm going to direct you to this article for you to know more about what navel-gazing is and how to fix it: Navel-gazing
Moving on from that, I wanted to touch on your usage of emotion words. I'm not one who really likes them because we don't really get to know what you mean in the poem if you're just using emotion words and that's because my happy is most likely not the same as your happy. My idea of sad is not your idea of sad, so define what you mean by that instead of just using these words. Define your emotions through metaphor and other forms of figurative language as well, is a good idea. Is it like being ran over by a lawnmower and then being spit out to the side, or perhaps is it the sky on your shoulders, crushing all of your bones? This helps better explain your emotions and it helps connect the reader to the poem better. It helps them relate.
I hope I helped and have a great day!
Thanks Kaos!!
Haiii!
I love this story! There are some errors I would like to point out though. In the 2nd paragraph, it says, "Perfection is key but I can’t even find the lock oh I must keep searching for answers to questions I can’t remember." I feel like that should be 2 sentences. Also, it wasn't very clear to me: Who is saying, '" “Oh, I’m fine.” '"? Besides those points, I really like the metaphors you put into this short story. Some may say, "I hate metaphors! When someone uses them too much, I can't tell what is actually a burning flame, rapidly consuming humanity, or if it isn't!", but I say, "Come out, come out, where ever you are!" Keep on writing!
Squirtlepowiee
Thank you!!
The "Oh, I'm fine." was the response to the question at the top "how are you?", so naturally the same person who the 'story' was aimed from, would have said the 'I'm fine'
Have a good day
Ohhhhhh! Wow! xD Understanding that, your story just got 1000000% better!
That's good
) glad I could clear the air