I thought I had gotten rid of you for good and for a while I did but slowly you came back to me. You snaked your way through the grout of my tile and into the soles of my feet like cold fingers that lingered too tenderly against my calloused heels.
I didn't notice you at first because I had bathed so long in the warmth of the sun that my body begun to feel like heaven on earth; warm, happy and new. Yet, all good things must come to an end and all too soon I could feel you slither through my body, feeding on quiet tears that I only cried inside because I was too scared to admit that I was falling for you all over again.
Carefully you wedged your way into my life again, until I started to feel like i was dependent on you. Dependant on the self-deprecating humor that bubbled below my surface like boils that no medicine could treat. Dependant on the acknowledgement that no matter what I did, I wasn't doing it good enough. You stretched your self to the limit until you had a grip on everything I am and then you started to tug me back into the empty abyss that I know is perpetually suspended somewhere inside me.
Cautiously I've begun to unlace you're wispy tendrils from my body but I don't know how much longer I can keep going. Hello, depression, my old friend. It's good to see you again.
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Canary word: Present
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125,027 Literary Works • 672,774 Reviews
An interesting reflection on depression here, I'm glad you chose to tackle a topic that can be difficult to address in poetry.
A few critiques:
In the third paragraph you missed an "i" to capitalize. Just a typo I'm guessing.
I think this poem might be a bit more active if it was written in present tense rather than past tense - just something to consider.
I would like to see a bit more specificity added to the conflict. You've done great establishing the "theoretical" and "metaphorical" implications of depression, but what about the specific day to day stuff? What do these metaphors translate to in real life? In my opinion this sort of specificity is what adds the emotional content to a poem - the metaphors add the depth and originality and something for the brain to chew on after they're done reading the poem, but the specifics, the human connection is what pulls at the heart-strings and make a poem real. I've done an article on specificity on poetry if you want some more details about how to insert more specificity, but the main idea is add more concrete details: Specificity in Poetry
A few praises:
Now that the critiques are over with, there are plenty of things you did really well in this poem.
First off, as I already mentioned, the metaphors! Oh boy, you had a lot of great figurative language -- I liked that grout/tile one from the beginning of the piece especially, and then all the bodily ones too. Sometimes it's hard for people to figure out how to deal with depression because it seems so non-concrete - but you made it into real images that people can picture in this, and I love the variety of your descriptions.
Second, your word choice is great. This poem seems elevated and yet casual enough to relate to. That ending line, was a good twist in the end, because I didn't see it coming, but yet it fit with the whole poem.
Lastly, I like that you made this a prose poem. Not every poem needs line breaks, and poems sometimes just go a lot better without them! This is one that benefited from being written in paragraph form, because I could just concentrate on the content and images and they sort of bled together as the lines and images kept coming. It actually made it almost overwhelming to read with image after image being described without any line breaks, but I think that was a good way to mirror the content, because what the speaker was describing was also overwhelming.
Overall, this was a good way to cover a heavy topic. I think you did a nice job, and I look forward to reading more of your work.
~alliyah
Wow! This is really well written. Your word choice is spot-on, and I could really sense the emotion and feeling of how depression can really consume and overtake you. This is so well done! The only thing I can think to mention to help is a little with the grammar: to change "begun" to "began" in that first sentence of the second stanza. And then a colon would be better where you have the semi colon before warm, happy, and new at the end of that sentence. Also "your self" should be one word (last sentence in third stanza).
Otherwise, this is fantastic! Please keep writing!! I loved it!
Hey there, myjaspercat !!.
This is Eros here with a review for you !!
I really loved this piece and the way the ideas are flowing out. The whole piece had a very good, smooth. Flow. I loved the choice of set of the words. The y h help the readers to understand the piece more completely.
I like the presentation of the whole piece. But only one things that has confused me is that the work doesn't look more like a poem... Well.this is just my point of view. Stanzas are a characteristic of poems but not always... And it doesn't make much difference to me, even if the poem is not in stanzas.
What matters the most is the content. I liked the content very much and the ideas are very unique. Loved the whole thing.
As to grammar ...umm... Well I don't know much about grammar and everything seems to be very well.
Great work!
Please keep writing such awesome works and we will love to keep reading them and reviewing them.
Thanks for sharing such ann Amazing work.
Eros.