i dont want to make poetry of you
but the prescribed bottles of medicine on your sink
and my aching stomach on the bus ride back
places me in last page of your diary
i dont want to sing you
but i can grasp the tree branches, and clasp on the trunks to hold position;
yet i doubt i would walk steady on the cracked lines
and i dont swim
but the waters are brimming near our faces
and i can feel the smile form, your eyes crinkle just the littlest bit and you rush before me.
i dont want to write a story of you
but im glued to the fluidity of your thunderstorms and the unpredictability of your grey clouds
i want to make poetry of you
but your chest feels lighter when i follow your steps—
and my heart feels heavier when i follow mine.
[A/N] this is pretty personal... so understanding it without specific context might be a bit tedious.
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138,680 Literary Works • 672,225 Reviews
Love this!!
thank you
hello there palshlong!
So, my impression of this poem is that the narrator keeps insisting they do NOT want to turn this person into art, but the whole poem proves that they cannot help doing exactly that. That contradiction is really unique to me! I know that it's one thing to write about someone who is beloved to you (we all know love poetry!), but I like how you subvert expectations here by making the narrator so adamant they don't want to do so - every image (like the breeze, the trees, the creek, storms, etc) shows how completely this person has entered the narrator's way of seeing the world.
The nature imagery is also effective for me because it makes the other figure feel unstable and difficult to hold. They are never presented as one fixed thing, and instead, they're these very grand ideas like weather. That works well with the narrator's uncertainty; they can grasp and clasp onto something solid, but they still doubt whether they should think the way they do about the other person. That is a good image: loving this person gives the narrator something to hold, but it's not necessarily somewhere safe to go. Very vulnerable! They're entering something they are not prepared for, which makes the later water imagery feel especially important since it equally represents something vast, like love / complex feelings.
^ Though, speaking of nature, I would be careful with how many natural images appear back-to-back. You have so many great ideas! Like there are trees, leaves, creek, branches, trunks, thunderstorms, and so on. While they all fit the poem’s world, there are so many, and I thought that some began to blur together. The more concrete lines about medicine and the bus ride, for instance, stand out because they interrupt the scenery with actual consequence - I wanted a bit more of that to humanize both the narrator and other figure.
I'm also not one to talk about grammar / nit-picky things like that, but I do think the poem would become stronger with a little more control over grammar and image direction. For example, "the breeze that chases the trees remind me of your teeth" is a very beautiful line, but I think it could be smoothed out syntactically. I'd suggest to read this aloud; that always helps me with finicky lines!
Nicely done though! It's exciting to see a new poet around!
best,
cocteau
hi, thanks for your review! this is more about a past friend than a loge imterest. more the less i really like your review it's pretty close to what i meant to convey through this poem! i will be taking your advice in mind, thank you!
Hello!
The potato is here to review your work. So... let's see what you have!
I like your title, it's catching and made me curious: "I don't want to make poetry of you" It's also really good since you fitted that same line in the text itself, so it doesn't feel absurd and disconnected, but rather like a small fragment of your poem summarising it and hooking the reader. Nice!
Each time you wrote 'i' (as in first person) it's 'I' (capitalised) but maybe you were just a bit lazy on that, which is also fine - or it's your style/a way of making your poem better (giving it a different vibe) which is even more fine! Other than that, I didn't find any other spelling mistakes, so good job!!! I usually have ten billion in my work, this is very good.
You write "[A/N] this is pretty personal... so understanding without specific context might be a bit tedious." I don't have specific context - which is good, because it's your life - so at one point I don't really get it ("but the breeze that chases the trees remind me of your teeth" - this isn't a connection I would make immediatly, but, as mentioned, I don't know anything, so please ignore this! However "the breeze that chases the trees" wow, really great personification there!) But other than that the rest is pretty comprehensible - I think. Maybe I have it all wrong, so...
The way you write things like "I don't want to sing you" and "I don't want to write a story of you" and then "but..." is also something really good that I like. And, when, at the end it's actually "I want to make poetry of you", that's a really really good rebound, like a kind of blow or something to remember this work by for the reader.
I also like how the title and first line is "I don't want to make poetry of you", but then the rest is actually poetry about them.
Overall, great job for this!!! I probably forgot a million things, so maybe just imagine I said them...? Anyways - Thank you for sharing it, keep writing and have a wonderful day!
-HMMHhehe the potato
thank you for the review!