i am ill.

Hey there, big welcome to YWS! I hope you're enjoying the site so far!

I think that this poem felt vulnerable and honest, it seemed like the speaker was in the experience of feeling really stuck between their mental health and the medication they were taking. They couldn't decide if the pills they were taking helped or hurt them, and in the last line even posit that maybe they don't need the pills. The repetition of the word "pills" sort of highlighted the endless feeling of going in circles.

As far as form, I appreciated the consistent usage of parenthesis and thought your line breaks and punctuation were good / consistent. I did think however that this poem could be majorly expanded!

I think the metaphors of being "trapped" and "at war with yourself" are used quite a bit and to make them new you might want to explore what they mean and some imagery within them a bit more. Right now the poem feels a little generic / robotic, rather than like something that the speaker is really experiencing in the moment or showing. I agree with niteowl that maybe the poem just didn't come across very emotionally? Not necessarally because there's not emotion present - but just because of it's short breadth.

Minor grammar note -> in this line "I am being fed artificial happiness to make me sad, less" I don't think you need the comma, but maybe you were using it to create sort of a dual-meaning pun so it could be read as "the pills make me sad" or "the pills make me sad less" perhaps a slash would better there if you were going for the pun.

Overall, it's a piece over a topic not many people tackle! But I appreciated hearing this perspective and definitely think that mental-health poetry is an important and significant subject for folks to consider. Thanks for sharing your piece.

~alliyah

Last Minute RevMo Reviews

Hello, there. Thanks for contributing this poem. Wow, what skill to incorporate the names of medicines into a poetic work! Who would have that of that? (I mean, you obviously...LOL)

I feel like this almost flows like a song. A very morbid song it would be, so I'm not recommending trying to get it set to music, but it does flow nicely, with a sense of structure and consistent rhythm. I love it. It keeps me reading.

I think you've done well in succinctly but effectively describing the emotions without being overly flowery or using superficially descriptive words. The approach is one that feels direct and matter-of-fact, and yet arranged artfully. Very good.

While I understand that you're most likely referencing these different medications from a controlled perspective, I almost feel like it could be interpreted as harmful self-medicating, which is not a message that one would want to promote. Again, I don't think this is the point you're trying to convey, but while I do appreciate the incorporation of the names of medications, it does almost sound suggestive of drug abuse.

Overall, though, this work is beautiful, expressive, and honest. I admire your writing.

My last comment is that I have had similar feelings and experiences with some of the medications mentioned. If these feelings are flowing from your personal experience, please feel free to DM me if you ever need to talk! You can make it, and so can everybody who goes through these circumstances!

Hi there fleuralplants! Niteowl here to review.

First, since ThePatchworkPilgrims mentioned formatting, here's the articles they were talking about https://www.youngwriterssociety.com/viewtopic.php?f=153&t=102831 and https://www.youngwriterssociety.com/viewtopic.php?f=153&t=103578 (the second method is the one I usually use). It is one of the most annoying things about posting poetry here for sure.

On to the poem itself-a depiction of a speaker with mental illness and having trouble deciding if the pills are truly helping or if they are better off without them. The ending is ambivalent, unsure if they truly need the pills but it is unclear if they stopped taking them and if that ended well for them (based on experience, it probably won't, but I also understand where this feeling comes from).

The structure of the poem has "flaws", but I feel like they support the message of the poem itself. There's the one rhyming couplet in each stanza, implying some sense of the speaker trying to maintain structure and order. The odd line breaks in the beginning lines, ending on filler words instead of more fitting end words like verbs or nouns, contrast the reader expectations and make the poem feel odd and broken, not unlike the speaker.

The tone of this piece is rather emotionless. That's not a criticism necessarily, but an observation. If you were going for a more robotic feeling mirroring how the speaker feels the pills dull their emotions, then this would be a good thing. If, however, you were going for a more emotional poem, I feel like there needs to be something more. This is admittedly difficult when talking about depression and mental illness, as people write about it a lot so it's hard to avoid cliches and such. When I dig into this topic (as I do pretty often, having lived with bipolar disorder for nearly a decade now), I try to find specific imagery, details that are personal to me so it's less likely to sound the same as other emotional poems. I try to evoke the feeling of depression and mania without actually saying those words. If I were rewriting this, I might build upon the metaphors of jail and war introduced using imagery related to those concepts to tell a story and paint a picture.

Overall, I think this touches on an important issue and the structure supports the theme, but there's room for more expansion and detail if that's something you want to explore. As always, keep writing!

Greetings fleurelplants As a thank for reviewing our chapter part, we have come to review your work

So, our normal format for reviewing poetry is vocabulary -> Grammar/Syntax -> Interpretation, in case some of our points appear out of order with the poem. However, since there aren't really any vocabulary points on this poem, we'll jump straight to grammar/syntax.

Regarding grammar/syntax- are the curved hyphens (~) intentional (part of your structure for the poem) or unintentional but "needed (as in, to ensure that there's a space between your stanzas? If it's the latter, we could happily share a link with you to assist with structuring in posts (we're on our phone atm, so we can't open another tab to get the link atm)

With regards to flow/rhythm- though we appreciate that this is free form, and thus doesn't have a set rhythm, the flow of the individual stanzas (excluding the final verse of each stanza) feels... off to us. At the moment, all four lines feel like they should/want to be read as one, and thus read too quickly for their severity to take hold in your reader.

Maybe including some form of punctuation in between the second and third lines to establish a form of flow or rhythm and not have it feel as rushed.

A point we really like about the structure though is the broken, yet still formatted, rhyme pattern (abbc). It feels fitting with the meaning of the poem. A battle between the structure and "chaos" of a mind at war with itself.

Leading on, we reach interpretation part. As a system who has so many mental issues we've been the whole subject of someone's PhD dissertation, we know how taxing it can be to have a never-ending, unwinnable battle in your mind that so often others cannot see or understand.

We feel your poem captures some of that experience, some of that feeling beautifully. It shows that feeling of wanting to feel a little less terrible, and the constant search for something that can help (and the constant fear that it will stop helping)

In conclusion- other than a few flow/rhythm issues we pointed out, this is a beautifully written piece of literature, and is very close to something so many people suffer through on a daily basis.

Stay writing, and stay awesome
The Patchwork Pilgrims