Poetry Critique

Poetry Critique Thread, I'll start off. What are your thoughts on this?

punctuation is past

dope

Big button

Big button

You got me nuttin’

I'm pretty good at rolling cigarettes.
I was trained.
"Roll me one,"
She asks the kid who doesn't smoke.
"Roll me one,"
The first few times it's a request.
"Roll me one,"
She stops asking.
"Roll me one,"
She repeats, dismissing the ugly, the bent, the limp, the loose, the tight, the ones who
burn too fast, too slow and especially the ones with paper sticking out over the filter.
"Roll me one,"
She says, throwing the deficient ones at my face with a flick of the wrist, like a small
calibre slap.
"Roll me one,"
She says through her teeth while I smoke the rejected, having been told not to waste her
our tobacco.
"Roll me one,"
She says in bed, smiling, staring at me in a language I don't yet speak.
"Roll me one,"
She says, giggling, while I fumble with the papers.
"Again,"
she says, inspecting the firmness of the cigarette, her head tilted to the side,
disappointed in my whiskey hands.
"Roll me one,"
She orders between sobs, and again, and again, until the smoke detector dies of
asphyxiation.
"Roll me one,"
She whispers, waking me up from my spiteful sleep in the hallway with a poke of her
pinksocked feet. But after all those years, after the thousands of cigarettes I had grown
something like a spine (likely a tumor).
"Why don't you roll your own?"
She purses her lip for half a second, making sure I notice, and deploys the answer like a
precision strike, having long hoped for a night to come when affection could be
weaponized.
"Because I like watching you roll them for me."
I'm pretty good at rolling cigarettes.
I was trained,
like a dog, by a bitch.
And I thanked her.

I like the first 5 or 6 lines.
Then I kind of goes downhill for me. It seems unnecessarily cryptic.
Also, you lack any good literary devices after the first few lines.
>arctic desert of repetition
>even if I bonded an eternity with them
These are the best lines.

>nobody trusts each other any more
>nobody trusts themselves anymore
These are the worst lines imo. Borderline rupi-tier.

To be fair I hate most confessional poetry.

t. john carpenter

The Perennial
My budding love,
too late I flower.
Winter rounds the bend
and my petals barely splay.
The others have already wilted,
but fulfilled their purpose nonetheless.

Tonight, I'm to be swallowed by frost;
a frozen shell of what could've been.
Still, my love is perennial as my bud.

Perhaps things will play differently next year,
or perhaps the year thereafter.
I'm helpless but to wait for you
- here, I've lain my roots.

One coming spring,
you'll cut my throat
and place me on your bedstand.

Whoops. "The Perennial" is the title. Not supposed to be the first line

Keats is my muse, but I have a lot of my own take on my narrative.

Is this good enough for an intro thus far?

Not writing for publishing but for myself and the sake of art

This reminds me of another poem that I liked about a late blooming flower.
I can't think of the poem or the poet right now though... It's going to bug me.

What's it going to be about? How long are you planning on making it? Why don't you charge your phone? Why did you use aabbc instead of aabba?

Forbidden apple, snakes delight
Let my mind taste wisdoms plight
Torn by will and pure desire
Your light shall be my guiding fire
Your light shall be my guiding spark
Through heaven's pleasure and the dark

I think about you when I roam
Because your eyes, they look like home
A firery image in the night
A firery image full of light

An excerpt from one of my longer, more pretentious poems:
Green seas suddenly shift vibrant blue,
As flora breaks for a thousand eyes
A flood of owl-eyed azure butterflies,
Glaring and charging at the Caravaneer.
With each blink a bat of the wings,
They swarm, flapping fury,
drifting and gliding,

A shifting storm of silent observers set upon him.
Fear takes, stripping the febrility of isolation
And he flails, kicking and thrashing through the tide, Pummeling the blue wave relentlessly,
While broken butterflies close their eyes,
Folding shut their final chapters.
The caravaneer explodes upright,
bursting through grey and blue,
Breaking mist and insect in flight,
Scrambling for shelter, crawling for nearby caves,
Fog frothing at their Mouths.

And one of my shorter, briefer ones:
50 cents to play.
A cheap price, perhaps, but compounded, a mountain.
Coins drop into the machine, rolling into rusted coffers,
In a frantic attempt to fill its metal innards.
Busybody employees take what’s been given.
It goes on like this for many years.
Eventually, the machine begins to fall apart,
Until it ceases to function altogether.
Open up its jaw,
Push coins between its lips,
Pray for one more game.

Which style should I stick to?

I quite like this one. I am not gonna go into stuff, like whether a guy like this should just man up or anything, but just as a poem, it worked for me

Narrative of Cupid and his modern influence, around 3000 or so lines, irrelevant to my writing but my charger is faulty and hardly works, aabbc better contrasts with other lines and is more flexible than it would be in aabba

you have taken everything i despise about contemporary poetry and made it wonderfully emotional. kudos.

I hate cigarette poetry so god damn much.

the concept here is a little cliche but the ending is great. both lines beginning with perhaps are a bit redundant.

>a fiery image full of light
redundant and stupid

your personal rhthym fits the shorter style much better, work on lineation and make things a little more vivid and you'll improve

is it 'The Wild Iris' by Gluck?

this is about Veeky Forums right

Meanwhile, somewhere in Alabama:
my sex robot,
Big Bone Bill,
is demonstrating his hip-thrusting capacity on a tarp in the lawn.
I’m on the porch pounding Keystones like a freaking champ.
It is Wednesday,
and I’ve been working hard on my robots,
Sexy Sally & Big Bone Bill.
I deserve a break.
Six months earlier I was doing construction,
booming the building business,
so to speak.
Jimbo (my number one farmhand) suggested I not “put all of my eggs in one basket.”
(I informed him that I did put my eggs into multiple baskets sorted by size and color.)
“If you want to make real money,”
he said,
“sell something that does the dishes and sucks your dick.”
There was already
an automatic dishwasher.

Cool, I'm interested I'm seeing more when you have it. Glad you thought about the rhythm scheme. I'm biased because aabba is my favorite 5 lines rhyme scheme

How do you get competent at naturally fulfilling meter and rhymes?
I find myself so limited with words that rhyme (especially multisyllable ones) that I have to force something, which makes it sound like an amateur rap freestyle and kills the atmosphere. But on the other hand I can't stand free verse since mine just devolves into rambling prose.
Is it just a matter of writing a ton of bad poetry?

It's not autobiographical btw.
My gf showed me some poems from her and her classmates that had to be about domestic abuse.
After my criticism she challenged me to write a better one.

Practice by writing single iambic pentameter lines (or whatever other meter you want to practice). Then write 2 lines, they don't have to rhyme or have any deep meaning.
Then write 4.
Then try rhyming abab or aabb or whatever.

as a victim of female-on-male domestic abuse it very nearly had me tearing up. you did well if that was your intention.

I prefer the first one

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

HE’S PAYING RESPECTS

He no longer mourns the body
six feet below him.
His tears are for the stone
grown grubby over the years,
and shriveled wildflowers
and that willow with a diseased
and dragging branch
for every year she’s been gone.

He’s not quite like the crows though.
They celebrate the dead as if it’s life,
sit together on a bough like undertakers,
dark eyes peeled for another corpse to eat.

And nor is he in league
with the old white-bearded man
who drives his mower across the grass
or those two young guys in the distance,
shirtless, wielding spades,
a hole in the world opening up beneath them.
No, he doesn’t show up here
because it’s what he’s paid to do.

Now, he can hardly remember what she looked like.
Her touch has been superseded by everything
from the flannel of pajamas
to a laminated table-top.
Her perfume is now coffee.
Her conversation, the television set.

He does grieve for the angel,
twenty years about to fly
and never once soaring.
And the marble bench,
lovingly dedicated
but too uncomfortable to sit on.

And there’s always himself to bewail, lament:
shackled by duty, beholden to tears,
buried alive
and in the open air of all places.

Undine blue dyed soapy waters,
Steaming, dissolving food residue,
Aloof and daydreaming I hang above.

If I tune in to the steelwool
In my hand whirling,
Chemical water gurgling,
Little white bubbles with salt freckles --
I get drunk,
Just from the mundanity of it.

But I'm being romantic, it really is boring
(As fuck).
And the people I work with are usually
Older than me.
Some are a lot older and I think about
Getting old and being here.

Hustling around for a two-faced boss,
And dourly dreaming over a spoiled sink.

Well this is very nice

I like this poem, but the word "guys" is glaring. I think it would be better as men or boys

I think 'guys' works, because nicely phonetically it is after 'young' g into g,

and a line above the line above has 'old white bearded man', so contrast old white beard man with young guys: could say or those two young men in the distance, or two young boys: buy guys is kind of inbetween men and boys;guys has an independent spirit about it/them; further seen by their shirtlessness:

Phonetically, guys seems to work them most. imagery, poetically, technically, either word can work, but guys isnt bad, and it might be best.

Do it a lot, that's really it.
I think that creativity and wit (what makes exceptional poetry) is something you're born with, but anyone can get a respectable grasp on control of words if they grind on it.
Learning more words will also open doors, especially if you want a more obscure voice.

4/10

4/10

0/10

8/10

3/10

7/10

0/10

3/10

1/10

6/10

Such astute critique

Had to make up for the lack of brevity in this sad, cruel thread.

a 0/10 for my sexbot poem?? c'mon !

And in that trance I reached the shore
With sands made of powdered bones
And saw on those gloomy dunes
Umbral men with sunken eyes and stagnant blood,
Who feed on dust and vapors

I walk down the sloping beach
And touch the waters with my toes,
Grey sea which bears no life,
But only cracked shells and dead weeds

The wave howl through the salty air
And herald forth a freezing gale
Which cracks the stone and quivers the jaw

There is a Ferris wheel on a rotting pier
Though I have never seen it turn
Maybe one day I will ride it and touch the sky

For now I sit in the sand
And take my place in the congregation
As we watch the cyclical moon raise from the sea
While the gulls loom above us
laughing

Ok I agree phonetically it works. And I definitely don't like "man" anymore because, like you said, it's in a couple lines above for the white bearded man.

But I don't think it fits the tone of the poem at all. It really stuck out the first time I read it. The poem has a kind of somber serious tone and "guy" is too slangy and relaxed imo (maybe different uses of guy where we're from).

If boy is too young, maybe lad. Or use some synecdoche and call them two young spades. But then you'd have to change the next line too.

Or don't change it, of course. It's your poem

But why?

Aren't critiques something more than assigning numbers?

>Aren't critiques something more than assigning numbers?
no

Not very good. Pretty clear Thing reference, done poorly to boot

I found it fun. Keep doing this.

I like it. Would like to read the finished thing tho to get a clear picture what it's about

...

...

Do they eat the apple or no? It sounds like they don't

my limbs are anchors
physical reality is abusive. atoms, objectivity, principles of movement: ship-dragging vestiges
metamaterial pools. dark matter sludge
bounded. wrapped. my problem is
i am not empowered
mind over matter over mind over matter over
go to work another day go to work another day go
acid eyesight. peripheral dancing. rats, mollusks, breath taking serenades
headaches of the damned, or, the psychedelic-fond
temples tunnels, echoes pinochet from clay
desk, door slamming. mundane chimes, the call of dry hells, late capitalism's howl
and i am not empowered
go to work mind over go to work over matter another day another day another day another day another day over

You think that's bad? Try slam poetry. Fucking awful and a pseud cesspool.

ricochet autocorrected to pinochet :^)

0/10 means read more, newpal. read a lot more.

rhyme is for newplebs who think poetry ended at Yeats. don't rhyme, you will be stilted as fuck. or DO rhyme to get it out of your system early.

I've read a good amount. If there's something you don't like about the poetry, tell me. It'd be a lot better than to say >psh nothin personal kid, read more

What does Veeky Forums think? I don't have a title for it.

I'll critique a fair amount of you guys. At work at the moment. Finish in an hour, I'll try and post on my afternoon tea break

when/if you read substitute w/

I like. Not the biggest fan of the repeated (Don't know what it's called) words like o'er. Can understand why you have done it, and what you are going for. If it wasn't a sonnet I would say scrap it, but since it is it is passable

Poetry ended at pound and Eliot. Which is funny how they both remarked on the death and decline of poetry

Ok. Well in not sure if you are new to poetry or are trying to do something different and contemporary, if the former read some more traditonal poetry, Keats and Wordsworth would be a good start and look at their rhythm

I like the imagery but find rhythm lacking

The first 6 lines had potential, youve missed the mark afterwards. Kind of looks like an emotional rant after that

Not a personal fan. A good attempt at free verse, nice imagery, by lacking in rhythm needs to be redeemed by something. I feel like something is missing, something needs to drag you above the rest of lousy free verse. Nearly there

I'll talk in a sec to you

Confessional sort of poems are done so poorly by women that I would stay away from them completely

post haikus! (rate 1-5 for each)

forgiving and right
christ listens to old lps
he takes a smoke break

my big decision
talk to them when you're ready
how tragic is that

sitting with the grass
mildew drops shine like mirrors
there are too many

playing in the creek
water runs the summer through
and you are okay

you are not afraid
because it's not the right word
the quiet driving

Haikus have some strict rules. The syllables probably being the least important. I can't actually remember them. But one of them is being impersonal
One of my poems

Distant hills, how silent
Over the idle rise
Country sits now quiet
Thinking much surmises

Across it blows,
The stirring gentle breeze
On earthy yellowed hues
Of eager painters pallets
A fitting spring debut.

Our canvas blank
Towards a bright
But humble stroke we strive
Longer days beforth
As Summer soon arrives

you're just as much of a pleb as this fucker here
the term is elision
only three is a haiku at all

There we go. Didn't know what to even search in Google to find it. A good sonnet, I know first hand the difficulty in a shakesperian sonnet, I'll give you alot of credit, the only thing I can rag on is the amount of elisions is too much for my personal taste. But I'll give it to you. You've tried to write a poem like Keats and youve succeeded

just a word of advice from a better poet than myself: "A rhyme must have in it some slight element of surprise if it is to give pleasure, it need not be bizarre or curious, but it must be well used if used at all."
the rhyming is a bit mundane but the images are solid and that makes up for it.

>desire and fire
one must move beyond that sort of thing


some good images here with a few weak points

>and touch the sky
is unnecessary and straying into cliché territory; almost ruins the solid image and emotion you were building before it

t-talk to me daddy uwu~~uwu~

tb h i am not informed about poetry in any real educated capacity, i just wanted to writedown a feeling regardless of net competency or clearness @ the end of the day

Death is Judgement

Hapless wanderer
Streetlight climber
Fencepost hopper
Midnight train rider
I am the one
Who kisses the lips
Of the darkness
Who drinks from the sky
The wine of the abyss
Window smears wearing midnight
Showing life continues on
In the church candles are burning
And even after one is gone
They burn on
Melting the eyes
Of the stoic mass-goers
While God comes low
And we become lower
He lends you His ear
Obeying the beckon of the holy God-show-ers
But He does not hear
He does not hear
His hearing aid fails
Though He is so near
He misses the candles
With His cobwebbed eyes
The one who dies is forgotten
The gold on his eyes
Will not be enough
To buy him a boat
And the other souls gloat at their crossing
Crossing themselves as they stow away
Watching Death rowing
Just rowing away
A snide snicker slides
From out the sinister side
Of the mouth of the old spinster
The other side smiles
Beguiles and charms
Holding wide both arms
And at a million miles up
It seems worth your while
So take that step!
Traveler depart!
Cast of the wormy cloak
Of a mud hut heart
For cats and cradles
Do you no good
Water is poison
Thanks to wily Wormwood
The end is nigh
Fly away to the moon
High in the sky
Like the Dish and the Spoon
You are a candle
Your flame is your heart
But there are so many candles
No one will notice
When one candle departs

mary oliver sucks

PRESS F

>poetry ended at pound and eliot

That's where I think your issues lies. I'm not saying you have to be educated. Heck I've never stepped foot in a university. You maybe just might not realise that poetry in unscrupulous and pain staking at times selection of world's to convey thoughts, feelings, ideas and rhetoric using literary techniques all on a rhythmic background. Start with rhythmic writing (easiest way to start is by looking at sonnets) and then add techniques and lastly rhetoric

I'm not that dude, sorry for tricking you. I agree about the elisions

Not gonna happen.

Here you go Veeky Forums, one more.

Forget


this human joke came around one day
to shop for some things that were missing
in its life - simple things - love, and such

'unfortunately' as a shop keeper 'we do
not stock those things. Not in the quality
that one such as yourself clearly demands'

Through glass cabinets, on racks, and shelved
things like memories were waiting for the right
moment to be seen as they were designed

glorious and irresistible. The human joke reached
around and produced its purse 'how much'
rattled the coins 'will this get me of that'

One finger pointed so sharp an arrow
of air darted towards the questioned doll
'careful' as reaching shop keeper 'it moved

people in here usually select a little slower'
close up it grew much bigger and sadder
'exactly' with a measuring tape 'how much

can I take, now' it stretched taught and hard
to measured two little fingers' width no
more could be exchanged for so little

'sorry' as sharpener with steel 'not a nail
or hair more' the doll squirmed and it too
quick darted out a hand to push a little more

to his measure to his side of the blade
'alright' a slip and down the knife slashed
through its own skin and bone. It laughed.

Open up the boarders and more will come
as freely as you like, and only you like. You
live as something that was once written like
a prayer or a song to the almighty, devotional
and unobtainable, but always there waiting.

A prayer

God,
I have forgotten how to feel important
If you have some time please help

When I think about it I have all I need
I am not asking for much just a little importance

or that feeling, you know, the one that opens
with a feeling like everything is going to better

than Ok. Ok is in abundance. I want just a little
bit more of what it is that makes me important.

Please?
Just for me?

"For a White Widowed Male"

Allusive, illusive, elusive, she, Melusine,
Coiled around the tree, apple between her teeth,
Crept down and attempted to tempt Adam into sin.
Or perhaps it was Persephone, goddess youth,
Stolen from her mother without so much as a scream
To play queen to a demon’s drowned, desperate dream.

In her eyes the allure of lamplight to a monster moth
Between her lips a song that’s toxic, acid sweet
Lilithkin on feathered wings, angel bound in leather things,
On my shoulders she sits, my maiden muse, she sings
Bringing out the very best, and the very worst, in me
Her name is Obsession, her footsteps my heartbeat.

This portrait I paint in mascara and smudged lipstick
On the pauses, on the margins, on the lacunae
Of the dog-eared pages of a doggerel book
That, when torn out and arranged alliteratively
Reveal the art in artifice, the artifice of art,
Astrologies, cosmologies, her eyes, my heart.

To make a monster out of a man is a painter’s ply
It is an exercise in art to demonize
To immortalize, to hallow in the dark halls of hell
But, my friend, to make a man out of a monster
Can only be the work of an enchanter’s spell, magic,
Our secret telepathy of paper and ink.

i remember in high school my english teacher said poems dont needto have rhythm ,, i thimk i said what i wanted to say w the combination of da words if its not still actually shit on that level also. maybe someday i will bee good enough to do it the proper way with rhythm, thank u user for advice. as for word selection I think (4 the 2nd one atleast) i could justify everyphrase, i am bad at prose & rhyme etc though. ty for recs too

Free verse confessional poems should be left to women with zero poetical skill. You guys are above them, strive to do better

All faces bleed
with that same red scent

The cry of dogs
is the same of man

Tightened fists
leave way to damaged goods

still; the self goes away
with every breath

correction poetically

how long has it been,
in the repetition of this arctic desert,
what do i know of my companions,
even with an eternity,
of days laden with (trivial) menial task,
chipping at my psyche.

i need to leave this wretched realm,
to distance myself for thirst of clear thought.

i'm not doing the rest but you get what i mean, it sounds too formal or something the way you've written it. try to condense it and change words.

Light Behind Words

You know that feeling: the first half goes down
easy, long and open breaths, lying
on the couch, feet up. You tell people
"Reading relaxes me." Should read more.
Legs start to ache, you adjust. Next page.
Next chapter. Ache, adjust. Looking up,
you’re surprised by where the light has faded to.

It goes by like that. Just glides on by.
Unwinds easily, like the thin threads
of the sweater you've been picking at.
Let it. We all know what happens next.
Next chapter. Next page. You change your grip,
the pages in your left hand growing fat.
Ache. Adjust. This time you sit up,
eyes no longer passing over
the page, now pushing down, deeper,
falling down. You raise the book
closer to your face, your eyes
begin to blur under your
glasses, the words now glowing
brighter, outstripping themselves
until they vanish, blind white,
with you moving into them,
moving through them, over them,
carried through sentences,
and then through all next pages,
the chapters cannot stop you
now, now all dissolve and
disappear, free, quick, coursing
along coils of thick pure thought.

--

All over, closed, the openings have changed.
That move there made you pause at first,
but now it is squared and set with purpose.
Walk through it again. You know now whose green eyes
grinned in the forest, the great truth behind
the glint of a trout. A light behind every word.
But how far outside can you carry that light?
The moon hung a little differently last night,
but how will the sunshine be tilted tomorrow?
Any fiction can be found, sifted out of the sand
in the sidewalk cracks, but how soon will
you stop searching? You know it’s imaginary,
illusory, fanciful as a parliament of faeries —
here, chapter one’s chance is no chess move,
and no long-nailed finger traces life's lines.
And yet, in the afterglow of the fading page
everything lingers as much more than it is.
You know that feeling too… when at a sudden stop,
you have it all in a flash, the present pressing itself
teeming with conspiracy onto your senses,
front to back and back to front at once,
and all inside an instant is lost in once upon a time.
Let the fabric of your vision keep its paranoia for now.
There is something at the edges. Something.

1. East

Drive east, and clouds surround the peaks
In soft gray mist, laden and low.
The mountains collect them into creeks
Before they breach the rainshadow

Which rules beyond, where sky can speak
The stupid blue of only sky,
And summer, lounging, kicks up its feet
With fading pinks in mid-July.

2. A Glass of Water

Bring me a glass of water, please. I just
Smoked. And more, the daylight and the breeze
That rolled along my tongue have left it dry
And have stoked my head to tinny pleasure. I must
Drink. So bring me a glass of water, please.

Old friend, hurry! I know the past gone by,
the events, deep-rooted, through which you earned my trust.
I know you’ll draw to fact with what I've willed:
You’ll show with the glass, brilliant with sky,
Gentle in hand. And just half of it filled.

3. Smoking Indoors

I
Open the window, so we might blow smoke
Vaguely towards it in attempted rings.
I, myself, will watch, shivering,
Trails of air open the glowing coals

That fell out of my cigarette. I regret
That I left them, but later will forget
Until the landlord finds them in the carpet
And decides to cash the security deposit.

II
You tranced, trying for a suitable shirt
from the small collection taken from college,
while others blew smoke, rising in rings,

white through your windows, their feet lounging out,
all feeling the full day that was still spilling
like his brush of blood feathered on the dirt.

4. Fortune Told

I suddenly became aware
of them: the facts. In fact,
instantly realizing that was that,
I reached to touch the truth that stared
extending its fingers as a dare.

It burned a bit: right there.
You see? It left a mark;
It glows a little in the dark;
It holds an old and noble spark --
Or so they tell me everywhere.

Stop annoying those in Power,
It is not —as you believe— your Hour,
Resort yourself for something simpler,
for you to spit your blabber:
Be officious in lost Causes,
Just as you yourself are lost;
Denounce War in the Arctic,
Go save the polar bears, dumb whore!

I smell someone lighting the faggots
is it time again to burn some witches?

Reposting from a couple of months ago

a silent hum
the piercing wind
head like a drum
mind in a spin

no one in sight
shadows, debris
eyes shut tight
too scared to see

old bones lay bare
spread on the ground
fully aware
of where they're bound

chest still beating
breaking apart
tired of jailing
a graceless heart

This made me feel cozy
This is kinda funny, but i feel like it's lacking something

I'm pretty new to poetry, but I find it pretty enjoyable so far. Rate this early attempt of mine.

Delightful you and I we gaze upon the stars,
on board that faithful ship so soon to be a wreck.
On deck we sit just you and I and took my hand
you did confess not fear but love naive and like
the stars so bright extinguished not they met with wine
dark sea

Fragment of what i've benn working on these last few years...

While the moon is shining over mouldy books-stacks penned by sages
Thinking takes him back through thousands upon thousands of hoar ages
To the very first, when being and non-being were nought still,
When there was but utter absence of both life-impulse and will,
When unopen there was nothing, although everything was hidden,'
When, by His own self pervaded, resting lay the Allforbidden.
Was it an abyss? a chasm? wat'ry plains without an end?
There was no estate of wisdom, nor a mind to comprehend.
For the darkness was as solid as is still the shadows' ocean,
And no eyes, had there been any, could have formed of it a notion.
Of the unmade things the shadows had not yet begun to gleam
And, with its own self-contented, peace eternal reigned supreme.
Suddenly, a dot starts moving - the primeval, lonely Other...
It becomes the father potent, of the void it makes the mother.
Weaker than a drop of water, this small dot that moves and bounds
Is the unrestricted ruler of the world's unbounded bounds.
Ever since the vasty dimness has been splitting slice by slice,
Ever since come into being earth, sun, moon, light, heat, and ice.
Ever since up to the present gallaxies of planets lost
Follow up mysterious courses, chaos-bred and chaos-tossed,
And in endlessness begotten, endless swarms of light are thronging
Towards life, for ever driven by an infinite of longing;
And in this great world, we, children of a world grotesquely small,
Raise upon our tiny planet anthills to o'ertop the All,
Lilliputian kings and peoples, soldiers, unread, erudite,
We engender generations, reckoning ourselves full bright!
One-day moths upon a mudball measeurable with the chip,
We rotate in the great vastness and forget 'twixt cup and lip
That this world is really nothing but a moment caught in light,
That behind, or else before it, all that one can see is night.
Just like whirls of dust and powder thousands of live granules play
In a glorious ray's dominion and pass over with the ray.
Thus against the never-failing night of time without a bound,
The spontaneous ray, the moment, still fails not to go the round;
When it dies, all dies - like shadows melting in the murky distance
For the universe chimeric is a dream of non-existence.

kinda fucked up that my simulacra gave a tedx talk
on empirically proving the existence of love
but I don’t even know how to French kiss…

also kind of fucked up that when two soulmates
buy each other iPhones, apple deactivates
the speakers on one and the camera on the other…idk.

but do you think it’s okay to get married anonymously LMAO

you are potentially right (not the writer of poem btw) that guys brings it down some 0.023529 level of tackiness, like takes it down from some classical pure thing to a slight blemish of profanity, but how to quantify as I just tried above without much thought.

I tried to think of a quick parallel, if the mona lisa was wearing a visible brand name label, that might be a worse offense, or a better execution, im not sure.

guys maybe does make it a bit more lax, and informal, instead of read in a gothic european church by candle light. It might appear a tinge blue collar. were they in the fields, having cold ones with the boys?

...

Cringe.

I mostly just write children's poetry.
Plant Dreams

When do plants close their eyes?
When the rooster crows, are those plant lullabies?
Drifting off into a world unknown,
Becoming seventy eight different clones.
When the sun is at its peak is it then they travel to their dream home?
Do they even get a say in the matter
Just work and work till there body is left in tatters.
Or do they go to sleep at night like you or me
Conserving sunless energy.

Sleeping with sugar plums in the nectar fueled heads,
Tucked in nice and tight in there little flower beds.
Dreaming up stories about where they come from
There god and life giver the yellow white sun.
Do they dream about falling?
Had a bad day at work bringing
Anxiety home eventually to bed.
All petals fall off their little plant head,
Looked up caught naked as little plant sprouts,
In young plant class with little plant doubts.

Transported on the plant clouds by the plant sand man.
His translucent green skin,
Gifting little plant dreams full of little plant whims.
What do little plants dream of?
Dreaming with love?
To come home to a large pot mansion
With sprout children,
Or maybe it’s just full of rose bud plant women.
Can they be selfish or do they share plant dreams,
Interwoven roots that share interwoven lives,
Playing like dreams in their ever changing plant times.
I guess Plants dream
About simple plant things.

I really liked any where i can read more?

this is very neat

There is nothing left today
But steel and fire and stone.
Though all we knew depart,
The old Commandments stand:
"In courage kept your heart,
In strength lift up your hand."

And although I do not speak much, anymore
Your voice has sparked flint
from my mortal tongue,
Flamed with arid, lips of woe:

"Hating yourself is powerful
Like drinking from a cool well
Beware, for you don’t know yet,
That water is poisoned, 'tis a sure bet.
A hundred times you mimic the motion
And still you are bound to forget."

But despite his plight
his public, perhaps,
Won't phantom the thought
That beyond our great wall
Something lies out of sight
Divine in nature, not matter how small.

Now I sit in the center of a burning house
And watch it char away
I’m protected from the flames that catch,
But they burn me all the same

Keep writing. You've got a style ... I find it appealing.

>poetry ends up looking like a fucking paragraph
jesus christ