split yourself open tonight; take the ends of your fraying sweater--
go on, knit yourself together now, before it begins to rain.
make a cup of tea, listen to
the wind, and interrogate all the wild, churning thoughts
that collide with the wall and fall in a heap
at your feet.
go on, knit yourself together now, and go to sleep.
make a bowl of dreams and dance with ravioli;
listen to the laughter and to wonderful thoughts
on repeat in your head--and to bleeding
rainbows that leave you angry
and exhilarated,
and happy all at once.
dream of wonderful things, dream~
of surprise
and adventure
and star-racing skies,
of bottles filled with medicine
and strange syrup sliding down your eyelids.
go on, wake up now, and knit yourself together.
make yourself a cup of reality and down it with a smoke.
the first time you taste a syrup that tastes
of cardboard, you will be surprised, knowing
you've never actually tasted cardboard in the first place.
it's the same feeling you get every time whisky
taints your tongue, in the shape of a flying beast.
(although betrayal is not whisky, nor is the rapping
of unsteady perambulating fingertips against your window.)
go on, open the window now. there is nothing there.
are you sure you imagined it? or are you still
uncertain?
some day, you will be wise and learned, and sit
with your gleaming toe-tops perched on a desk of wooden tears.
then, you will polish your glasses and your voice-box, and you will fill
each thought to the brim with vodka. your shelves will burst forth
with futility, and literature, and the accumulation of dust
that ventures forward in narrowing sequences.
and yet, you will down cups of fear every night,
and swish the dregs in your empty teacup--until you can feel
the sky against your cheek, until you can feel
Love enveloping you, and until you can feel in your heart
that everything will be okay.
so go on, make yourself a cup
of tea, sit on your porch, inhale,
and tell your heart that this is what
reality feels like.
knit yourself together now.
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125,027 Literary Works • 672,773 Reviews
Okay pomp. I am here to save you from the wretched green room and to save myself from a reviewing dry season.
This poem speaks to me.
We really must be nwins because I can see exactly where you're coming from. Reading this poem leads me through a barrage of emotions.
the reader gets the sense that the narrator is perhaps just a little bit not-quite-there. It's like the world is spinning a little bit and is not quite the right color and everything is coming undone at the corners. Which fits the content perfectly.
What I get from this, other than the delicious feelings I mentioned before is a story about a young person who is questioning and reflecting and fearing and relishing life. There's all this beauty that life creates with the beautiful sky and soft things and colors, but the narrator isn't certain what will happen next. It seems to me that they think they will end up successful but changed into the kind of person who doesn't notice the beauty of life. The kind of person who sits behind a stale desk and slaves away, forgetting their purpose. And the young person is afraid of becoming that. But in the end they decide to live in the moment.
Regardless of whether that vague story was what you intended, that's what I got out of the poem.
Your word-choice was fantastic, as always, and the images were vivid.
Again, one thing that turns people off from poems is length. I think there are a couple places in here that you don't really need. Those are up to you to find. If the sentence doesn't add something to the poem, you should cut it, me thinks. That way you can condense your point and emotion. At the same time, I enjoyed almost all of this... There was one stanza that seemed to not fit for me.
It was the part about the syrup and cardboard. It just seemed like a useless stanza that went on for too long.
The rest seems to follow some sort of convoluted pathway. And that's good. That it's convoluted I mean you know.
I didn't notice any glaring mistakes or anything. This was too surreal to know what is supposed to be there and what isn't. You did a fantastic job at that.
I'm sorry this review couldn't be more helpful, but please, if you have any specific questions about whether something works or not, I would love to be of service.
Keep writing!
~fortis
Surreal and beautiful at the same time! <3
Oh man! This was really cool. It was such surreal experience just reading this poem with all of its strange imagery and themes. I quite enjoy how you paired up imagery with senses that normally wouldn't go with it, such as feeling the sky, tasting the shape of a flying beast in the whisky. It's all so enthralling to think about.
I only have a few criticisms.
I think that it'll flow better if you should replace "you will" with "you'll". This line stood off to me because it had the extra syllable.
I found this break was weird. Perhaps you could break it up like you did in the third stanza, and that would tie together the whole of the structure. If you break it up, it gives more time to breathe and to feel the suspense in reading it that you want to have.
I quite enjoyed your freeform poem. It's not often that I find a freeform that I really like, normally because they don't seem like poems to me. But this was great and I definitely think that you should keep up your writing!