Lady Morrison
your skin is made of marble
and your eyes are made of glass
you are cold and your breath
frosts the mirrors the windows
your every movement
is calculated
your heart is a butterfly
with tattered, dirty wings
you are a porcelain doll
donning a pale blue gown
lilac fingernails
and fragile blackened curls
you are a tricycle
a rusted antique
like an old journal
you wear a thin layer of dust
to bed
you glow in the night
a star on the Earth
caged by the clouds and
the whistles of the wind
sweet and sour
your words are thick as syrup
lathered with contradictions
a clock chimes and
you jump you cry out
you run from the room
with your slippers off and
your bathrobe on
all your work is forgotten
I didn't use to think of you
as a coward
but now I'm not so sure
you make mistakes that
kill your smile but
widen mine
you are learning fast
how to dance on raindrops
to tiptoe under the mountain
to swing in the backyard
with your back to the sun
where not a care in the world
can seem to catch you
and hold you down
you are terrifying and strange and beautiful,
something not everyone knows
how to love
Points:
Time spent:
IP address:
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.
140,080 Literary Works • 672,994 Reviews
Hey there Emmylou!
This is a really interesting poem, I got that it was more of a portrait-esque type poem describing and portraying a character and the speaker's emotions toward that character. I thought it was interesting and it definitely kept me reading from the beginning to the end, though I thought the format itself was a bit distracting spaced out as it was, I usually separate out my stanza depending on the idea -- so the stanza breaks become almost like paragraph breaks, where each idea is a new stanza/paragraph.
Your first four stanzas broken up into those two lines seemed a bit of an odd decision to me, why not just group them? Feel free to chat this up with me, I'd love to know what the decision behind some of the stanza lengths were.
That being said, I think this piece is pretty simple and light as it is -- I think it can be a lot stronger if the form was tighter -- and by that I mean, it needs some sort of overarching meaning or story behind it, so that by the time we get to the end we can feel a sort of satisfaction. At the moment, there's nothing really here to tie it all together, we're just left with a series of description about a person and the knowledge that the speaker loves this person -- but what's the cost, what's the value? Where's the tension?
I hope this helps, and as I said, I'd love to chat this one up, so if you have any questions or concerns, feel free to let me know.
~ as always, Audy
Hi there Emmy,
I liked this poem. It was simple and pretty description with a bit of story behind it. I liked it. It wasn't anything too complicated. Although it was pleasurable it wasn't especially unique in a certain way. But not every poem has to be
I didn't really like the lack of punctuation. Every now and again I'd stumble and need to go back because I didn't know where the sentence ended. I think you should add in the capital letters and the commas and the full stops. In general, it makes the poem easier to read.
Other than that, I liked it ^^
Deanie x
Hi! Laminated here
I loved your lack of punctuation and capitalization. Sometimes it can seem like the poet is trying to hard, but with this piece the effect to me was a string of thoughts.
You used excellent imagery, particularly in the beginning.
And now for some nitpickies!
Every time I read over this I felt like "blackened" was not the perfect word, here. To me, blackened means soot-stained or burned. If this was what you were trying to convey, then by all means keep it! However if you were simply describing the colour I suggest using more specific colour description, like "ebony" "jet" or simply "black." To your discretion, then.
This verse is amazing, and seems so close to perfection. I would change "lathered" to "layered" or "saturated". As well, for a verse containing smooth syllables and sounds, "contradictions" sounds particularly harsh. I suggest substituting a softer word here.
And, finally;
Was that comma intentional?
That is all! A beautiful piece, thank you for sharing!
Laminated