Poetry Critique Thread

What happens to a meme deferred?
Does it shrivel like a raisin when it’s sunny?
Or is it supple and plump like a cunny.
Does it come in the form of a cartoon toad?

OR

DOES

IT

EX

PLODE

No I know I was being indirect, I like the wallpapers user

read the first line and the last stanzas and was thinking of wednesday frog, before I even read the last line.

Two stanza's is plenty enough for weight, lad.

damn.

whenever I read great poetry it makes me shiver a bit. makes my heart feel like there is not enough oxygen in circulation.

Alright fair point lad

...

I’m finding it hard to focus with you wedged in my mind
So, I looked, searched online, took some quizzes, tried to find
the reason we don’t talk much anymore. I don’t want to be needy,
all of this could be resolved with three lines, a few, ‘hey, it’s not you it’s me,
I just don’t love us like you do’. It’ll only hurt for a minute, day, year, or two.\

Erections abound
Lights out in the Kremlin bogs
PIssing everywhere

(The Kremlin is a gay bar in Belfast / Bog is a toilet)

His Yellow Dog

Everything was alright though,
Because he had her still,
Everyone else was dead or gone,
The world had gone to hell,
Months of hunger, gaunt children,
Delicate words on tattered pages,
Writing so small it could scarcely be read,
Night whispered words of bomb-ashed sages,
Gunshots at evening, roasting flesh,
A fever that took meat from bone,

Darkening madness overtaking some,

Gibbering in the red night,
Cries for children in the rubble,
Hollow eyes on living corpses,
Death in the corner chewing leather
With everyone else,

But he had her, one yellow dog,
Thin, a blanket over hard angles,
Her hair weak and dull,
Hiding under the table as the bombs fell,
As he wrote in an unnatural darkness,
And saw all within the lines at daybreak,
And still she wagged her tail,
As the last hours drew in,
And the bombs stopped falling,
The city reeling in a narcotic haze,
Of smoke, and gas and hatred,
But it was alright,
Her ragged breath was yet life,
When his sister died he had wept,
When his father died he had paled,
The rest felt only the relief of a grave,
When she died he held her in a tattered coat,
And carried her to the empty lot,
Where tires burned for months,
And cars gutted lay in wrecks,
Consigned her to the soil in the still morning,
Before the world began again

Also

>the immensity
>Of the individual

is meant to be mildly ironic. A city is immense, an individual is small.

How deep under the sea is Rapture meant to be? I feel like the problem of having windows and skylights that don't cave under the immense pressure was never really explained

Just by virtue of the ocean water being blue, it had to be within like 400ft of the surface.

As long as you have a solid structure and the ability to keep pressure inside the structure, you would be fine. Glass would have to be thick, though.

Biggest problem is that there wouldn't be leaks like you see in Bioshock: You would have condensate dripping, and you would have catastrophic failure; there is no in between.

See: youtube.com/watch?v=Zz95_VvTxZM

>This is a grandiose and I feel reaches a bit over its weight, ambitious but unsuccessfully so and therefore pretentious. Just feel too inflated for me, I admire you aiming for profundity but I don't think you can jump into a poem like that, it's too pompous imo.

I was defending the first writer, for striving to be pretentious and pompous, ambitious, grandiose, and inflated.

*I forgot profound

No matter how hard i breath in it all just feels the same

Everytime i look at the ground theres something tapping at my shoulder

It trys to get me to look up and on some occasions i do

On those sorry days that i do i see the sky. It's plastered and rests motionless and infinitly to my tiny mind. Streaming all the blues of creation I find that i'm the most alive when water tames my thirst

in this shallow pool are clouds that from time to time occupy this space . And when I reach for the clouds all i've ever felt was air.

So its a good thing? I'm not sure. I thought pretentiousness was using high level language to convey something shallow.

I was just trying to be supportive, and encouraging, instead of repressive, oppressive, offensive, discouraging, dismaying, demeaning, I was trying to be the good cop.

i appreciate you user

-A Palms Frond Psalms-

A tropic palm, the subject of a midnight frame
A psalm to the solemn November night
Frayed and red-tipped leaves hang --
Overhead; dripping drops, a puddle alight.
A party could be heard
Stepping from the palms and frond psalms
Found my weathered ear assured
that what it hears of malaise and disrupted calm
Lives below that - the palms frond psalms

-The Day Lost-

Never had the sight of dawn --
The sphinx: it synchs the breath of day
Neither by arduous heart nor pitchforked hay,
But a pock-marked wall with resin stains.
By piston and cog the hallowed log lays -
A present fog over the redwood’s grave.

I'll stick around and crit now

Clearly you know more about poetry than most of us; the first poem was cutesy and I loved the playing with the sounds of words. The ABAB structure helps, but I always found that sort of scheme to be distracting; abba or aabb sound much more organic to me. Usually, ABAB is something quite serious to me, as seen above in Housman's poem or with any of T.S. Eliots work. I could be talking out my ass here, but thats what my impression of it was.

second poem was even more lyrically whimsical than the first. I think it sacrificed story in order to play with words too much. As such, its describes the scenes well but I can't help but get confused by the cryptic nature of its message, if there even is one.

>Clearly you know more about poetry than most of us
You have me all wrong Im just starting out, but thank you Im really glad you liked it. Both of the poems have meanings, but I see what you mean, they are obscured.
I like the concept of this a lot, but the execution leaves something to be desired. Keep working on it user, Id love to see where you take it.
>I don't wish to make a joke
>saying so.
Really awkward to read, the whole thing really, but those two lines stand out.
>I am very weak.
>I don't wish in saying so to make a joke,
>But I have nothing to give.
>I guard jealously
>The fantasies alive in the past --
>Weigh me down and burn me.
>Like molten lead from the core of the earth;
>Let me, at last, be ashes.
Something like this might make it more smooth. Of course thats my rendition of your poem so it will never be quite right, but I hope I've given you some idea of how to progress from here
fuck is that good.
It comes across quite Rupi-esque, but that could be what you're going for. Im sure theres an audience for stuff like this.

Rupi doesn't use aabbc rhyming structure tho, and she puts
Pauses in the
Most random
Spot
s.

line-breaks aren't pauses, they're semantic divisions

I know this is probably pretty corny and basic and just bad in general but I'll take any thoughts. I think I'm writing them more as song lyrics than poetry, though I haven't written the music yet.

Sit back with me and try to hear
The melody of a rocking chair
Or a paper plane flying through the air
Have you ever heard a song so pretty?

All the broken glass and urban decay
Leave bold outlines as they’re washed away
But have you ever seen such a perfect day?
Beneath the harsh skyline of the city?

So the desert willow grows
And the medicine flows on in
But who wants to know?
If there’s a better time for us to begin.

The groundskeeper and the summer rain
Rip out all the weeds as they circulate.
And so I’ll never see
the symmetry in how they lay
A bird that never flies is not a stone.

All the chattering of the new display
Is supposedly the sign of a coming age
There are screams coming down the old alleyway
You can hear but only when you’re alone

And so the epidemic grows
And the medicine flows on in
But who’d want to know?
When the withering starts to begin.

I dunno about you but when I read a porm, the line breaks are a dramatic pause that fits where a command cannot. Take Love song by Eliot for example

>Is it perfume from a dress
>That makes me so digress

It's one sentence, grammatically, but the line break is dramatic pauses for effect.

I think treating them as a dramatic pause steals the nuance of the punctuation already put in place.

I'd like some feedback. the honesty and animosity of anonymity is invaluable to me. This is a poem about the coming of age, the line breaks are sort of arbitrary at this point as it was written originally as stream of conscious. I'll try to make some comments on other people's work, for whatever qualifications i have.

Simóne

When I was blessed briefly with bohemian blush
and more cheap charm than a gypsy, I lived down
the road from a boy who looked like a chestnut
and his older sister Simóne.

Simóne wore a broken bicycle bell about her neck
where it came cupped softly between her budding breasts.
Only about the size of a shooter marble and as round.
When I walked up on weekends, welcoming the fresh
spring scent, Chester greeted me cheery but fleeting.
Frowning when the sight of Simóne’s bell left a ringing
in my ears, though it didn’t make a sound.

How a year in youth is bound to be the basis
for a clear superiority. How low did I bend
to make my amateur advances felt. I hold positive
she knew when I leaned down, I was peering up
at brightly patterned secrets. After such a shameful invasion
I spoke to her only in stutters and when, in May, I
finally choked on a paltry proposal, her family was planning
to spend the summer in Poland.

On return, Chester looked more like an almond
and disconnected images created conflict in my mind,
for in regretful reasoning I had become callous.
A jealous callous, I noticed now the rust speckles
on Simóne’s dull decoration, I recognized lust
and separated obligation. The allure of gypsy charms
was broken in the Fall, and I left before she noticed.

If that's the case, why even bother having line breaks? Just stop when you have enough syllables, and if using structure, have a rhyming word.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images: and cling
To the notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing

Sounds different with the line break on line three replaced with a comma, and is less aesthetically pleasing and adrupt than if it had not it's own line.

>If that's the case, why even bother having line breaks?

Because they're useful as semantic divisions. And there is a natural pause from your eye moving from the end of one line to the beginning of another (slightly shorter than a comma), but its hardly dramatic.

Think about Yeat's Leda and The Swan. This piece has an intresting use of enjambment that, by moving the next line forward to meet the end of the previous. Considering he breaks on the period, it's obvious that the line-break isn't the source of the pause.

Someone like Browning purposefully uses enjambments to hide rhymes in strictly formal works (see: My Last Duchess) so the language feels more fluid.

The Dishwasher

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.

The sentiment is universal so why did you choose the imagery you did? The answer is obvious, because it was an immediate experience of yours. But I don't think there is anything about the whole kitchen setting that is intrinsic to the meaning itself or significant of its own. In other words, any mundane setting could convey this poem just as easily. Therefore it strikes me as a surface poem with not a lot of depth to it.

I actually think this particular imagery is quite good. There's a sense of purification but also there's this sense of going around in circles when you clean it with the steelwool.

So for dishes the circular nature of it, the repetition, is what makes it clean. But the author is in a sense doing the same thing, except instead of making something clean he's spoiling his life.

Your mother and I parted ways about three years ago
She went east and I went north 100 miles or so
I never saw her past that day, and she never saw me
And so my son you were not born, you never came to be

You never had her bright blue eyes, nor my early graying hair
You never had my intellect or her spirit without care
You never got to read the Bible, to grow up big and strong
You never had to figure out what was right and what was wrong

I never got to tell you that life was far from just
You never got to tell me you’d make it fair, you must!
I will never get to proclaim to all who live below or above
That you were my son, my precious son, who I so dearly love

>Literally and unironically "muh safe space"

A bud (who is much better than me) want to do a chapbook full of southern stuff with me. Is this piece worthy?

>a sense of purification
But no purification actually takes place. Metaphysically that is. So it would be a stretch to say that just because he cleans dishes that it's philosophically important. I think it's a little dishonest to say that there's a link by negation as well, as in "it's important because the dishes are being purified but the narrator isn't."

>no purification takes place metaphysically
Are you going to tell me the plate does not become clean, in a metaphysical sense? Why, because the food is in the sink now, but there's still food particles in the world at large? What nonsense.

If the piece was about Chopping onions it would have a completely different tone. The kind of lazy (in terms of speed) writing wouldn't fit. The sense of repeating something over and over until you're done wouldn't be there.

I should point out, I'm not the author, I'm just an user who thought it was a good poem

I enjoyed it.

That's tranquil; rolls to the end wonderfully. Feels like a real psalm, though maybe a little more succinct.

shelter-cracks accrue dust
labor-men touch steel, hear clangour, breath rust
army-masses supplant dictatorial coups
rumor-men blame the jews

Nice start, you clearly have an eye for descriptive detail in some sense. I feel like it may behoove you to look again at some things which drew my attention. For starters, I think some of your words and phrases were ill chosen, or to presume the worst, less than considered. For starters
>tattered pages
>tattered coat
neither of these holds so much significance that a word like this needs to be repeated. Also,
>roasting flesh
is ambiguous in the context, is it people, or something like a communal barbecue? It's fine if this is intentional, even preferred, I just thought you should be aware of its impression.
>hard angles
>unnatural darkness
>living corpses
>yellow (what shade???)
all feel like cliche, or dull descriptions. But, I must give credit where credit is due, some bits and words I liked very much (because of their meaning or the context they are in or their sounds):
>Gibbering
>narcotic haze
>Death in the corner chewing leather
I'd also like to say, nice idea on the relationship between man and dog, but it doesn't feel quite bleak enough. The post-apocalyptic feeling seems rather unspecific, and the man and his dog do not receive enough direct attention. When the dog dies, I want to feel betrayed and depressed.
You have a very strong start. A few more revisions and I'm sure you'll have a stellar poem.

I find washing dishes mesmerizing at times because it can be so monotonous and effortless. I wanted to communicate that feeling and I felt it was more appropriate through images than saying it directly. But also the more overbearing feeling that in spite of the slight romance it's a boring ass job and I don't like it. It's certainly not meant to be profound no. Just every day thoughts in a dry job.

Here, in the author's words, is exactly what I'm saying, but in a critical way. The mesmerizing element of dishwashing comes through, but I don't sense the poetic depth that you do in the sense of purification. I find your assertion meaningless. Yes, the plate is being cleaned. But if that's supposed to represent anything, then what is it? Who is it? How? Why? None of this is clear to me so I take it as an incidental reading.

I liked this poem, but I think it needs some refinement.

In the second stanza you end with "though it didn't make a sound". I think is unnecessary, and takes away from the beauty of "the sight of Simone's bell left a ringing in my ears." On the other hand, sound rhymes nicely with round earlier in the stanza.

You seem to be trying to rhyme the third line with the final line in both the second and fourth stanzas, but in your third stanza the pattern doesn't hold.

You should try to solidify (or get rid) the rhyming scheme you seem to have, and balance that with some of the poem's nicer turns of phrases.

>/pol/-men blame the jews
ftfy

How many hours a day do you all read?

I really was only focused on internal rhymes for this, but you make a good point. I'll try to iron out some of the inconsistencies in the structure. Thank you for the feed back.

I pretty good bit. I also try to make sure to read at least one poem I've already read before out loud a day.

Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang (Gucci gang!)
Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang
Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang (Gucci gang!)

-T.S. Eliot

I've been trying to write one garbage sonnet per day about dreams I've had in hopes of eventually getting better. Biggest current problem is bad rhymes.

Fragmented pictures of a house in grey
Away from those who seek what lies within
Abandoned long ago, left to decay
With summer insects' song it called out then
In dreams the door gives way to solid black
A void that inhales all the August breeze
The woods around will offer no way back
For evil's shared by every ghostly tree
What waits inside is never to be known
No man who's ventured there has since been found
In moonlight it stands in its field alone
With black aura that bleeds into the ground
The visions mock and wrest me from my sleep
Some devil's house within the woods so deep

Repeating scene that steals away the light
From other indistinct pictures of day
A crescent beach below a moonless night
Where waves cast back kept sun of yesterday
The stars that pirouette as moving scapes
Of heroes and their gods in that dark field
Dissolve into aurora mouths agape
Their radiance is never set to yield
The song of death glides through the branches there
But all that's heard is wavebreak as a wall
Of white noise harmonizing with the air
It echoes up to embers as night's call
On eyelids utopia's old mauve glow
For flight to where there's peace is all I know

You notice the purification aspect by looking at the first stanza. The water is described as undine, meaning a female nymph water spirit, and as soapy. It's given an active, cleansing character (He could have described it as immovable, purifying what comes into contact with it by it's sheer force, but it would be weaker). It also gets rid of impurities, as the second line indicates. Note he starts off being above his work: "aloof and daydreaming I hang above". Then it dives into the details of the work.

You get the connection between his work and him by noticing that his third stanza is an inversion of the second.

I'll denote the poem as follows: 1.3 means stanza 1, line 3.

2.6 is romantic mundanity - 3.1 is realistic boring
2.5 implies giddiness and joy - 3.2 crassness and contempt
2.4 notices a particular that makes him happy - 3.3 notices a particular that makes him unhappy
2.3 chemical water moving evokes feelings of movement, reaction, life - 3.4 evokes feelings of self-consciousness, death
2.1 & 2.2 author is the one doing the repetitive motion, focusing on it, having direct control on it - 3.5 & 3.6 author comes to realize he is involved in a repetitive motion, that is out of his hands to some extent

He starts off above his work, does his work in its particularity, realizes he is being worked upon in a particular way, and is now left with this idea that he is worked upon, not just in particular, but also in general.

Putting this all together we get a specific feeling of disjunction that we wouldn't have felt if it wasn't cleaning dishes. His work cleans something, but it doesn't make him clean. The tools he uses evoke a repetitive, circular feeling which somehow goes somewhere, but by the end of it he's being used as a tool that goes in circles without going anywhere. The bubbles from the sink are floating up above, but he's sinking.

It wouldn't be the same if he was a construction worker. You wouldn't get the cleansing contrasted with the spoiling, you wouldn't get the floating, dreaminess of bubbles contrasted with the grounded, harsh reality of life. You wouldn't get the repetition leading somewhere (cleanness) vs. leading nowhere. The actual content of a construction worker's job is more "grounded" than dishwashing is, just because you're dealing with metal, wood, stone, concrete, hammers...these things that for whatever reason remind us of solidness, reality, immovability, practicality.

Okay Toohey, we get it: The mundane is great.

>It's given an active, cleansing character (He could have described it as immovable
Why would you describe dishwater as immovable?
>It also gets rid of impurities, as the second line indicates
Common sense indicates this as well.
>His work cleans something, but it doesn't make him clean.
The tools he uses evoke a repetitive, circular feeling which somehow goes somewhere, but by the end of it he's being used as a tool that goes in circles without going anywhere.
This is a huge contradiction though. Is there a circle or isn't there? There's nothing in the poem to indicate either.
>The bubbles from the sink are floating up above
Again, common sense. This is what bubbles do.
>but he's sinking.
You have foisted that imagery onto the poem. It's not contained within it.
>Your last paragraph.
I disagree entirely. A construction worker could easily be mesmerized by his work, for example if he were working at heights and seeing things at a distance.
>You wouldn't get the repetition leading somewhere (cleanness) vs. leading nowhere.
This alone is not a very profound idea. Many people have job dissatisfaction.

>checked
true and thats why I said rupi-esque. I was reffering more to the subject matter and the YA feel it has. But also like I said, there is a definite audience for that genre, so youre probably better off than any of the more profound, structured attempts on here.

Is it wrong that I read this in MC rides voice to the tune of Beware?

All of those points demonstrate not only an actual understanding of what I wrote, and what the author wrote, but also an unwillingness to engage with my point, which is that dishwashing in particular evokes feelings other things don't.

Just as an example, you claim I've foisted sinking imagery onto the poem. "And dourly dreaming over a spoiled sink," is a play on words. It describes both the literal sink, and the process of sinking that is his life. This is something you wouldn't get unless you used a job that utilizes a sink.

Fashion Today

A congestion of thorns bulging,
And splashing over one another
The way laundry gets wrangled and contorted in the wash.
Or that condition where too many teeth
Start to fill in one place.

Each spike is adroitly placed for decoration,
And painted with something that is
Like silver, but more sullen,
And proudly so.

Makes a sparkling dress that mesmerizes,
Those lonesome folk who dine on peeks through,
Bludgeoned glass.

The shimmering robes accentuate the
Tumultuous glum within.
But with all of their sorrow so
Desperately worn on the sleeve,
They are still invisible.

Laughter takes the crowd around
The fool whose groping hands
Are buried in tenebrous light.

YA =\= millennial. When I think YA I am grasped by images of Harry Potter or Ursula K. Leguin, not people trying to find closure in a despondent society that uses up your body and your organs and leaves your soul to rot while browsing through the endlessly long Facebook scroll, hoping, maybe, you've missed some little piece of information and that hiding in the bytes of data, layered in the HTML code of the messenger, that there's some real human connection behind it all; that a woman you've overlooked three times over is thinking of you, and that maybe, this time (if only we could be so lucky) it will work out and you have the ability, 20 years from now, to say you met online when you weren't even looking.

>dishwashing in particular evokes feelings other things don't.
I'm not disputing that at all. What I'm saying is that it doesn't communicate with itself in the way you're suggesting.
>... is a play on words
I can't take your word for that. Your only evidence is that the word "sink" is deployed... but that's exactly what it ought to be called. There's no salient comparison between that word and any sense of "rising". In fact there's no mention of anything rising at all.

You guys remember when someone posted an obscure poem by a famous poet and Veeky Forums shitted the fuck out of it? I do, haha.

The Plath Moon one?
The Knight Shakespeare one?

If I am to wode with the damsel, the dear,
If to dwell by her droop, if to dote at her ear,
Then she mustn't be lacking a dimesworthy rear.

>that there's some real human connection behind it all
Concept is much better than the execution, I like that quite a bit. Maybe it's the futility of it. I get that you're trying to capture what it's like to be a millennial and I think that could be done well, but your execution was off to me.

I posted a poem from Ungaretti once and someone said that "you repeated "like" 3 times like a retarded child" while another said " spotted the soyboy liberal". twas pretty funny.

I'm new to this so go easy on me
I'm sure you can see where my inspiration might have come from.
--------
Ghost

Dark skies stretch over my vision like a starry quilt over my head.
The orange street lights cast their light onto the haybale where I lay.
They enter a deep harmony with the cigarette in my hand and the music in the distance.

And then, the burning.
Could you call it chainsmoking?
or simply running.
Running, running, rain soaking,
Cold eyes water, cold eyes choking,
Running, hiding,
from the ghost I have become.

I flicker under the street lights that now dim out the stars.

My thoughts, take them with a grain of salt.

Can a noun stretch over vision? Vision is the ability to see, not that which is seen. Street lights casting light is redundant. How do they "enter" harmony? Can harmony be entered to? Can you describe this harmony more or differently? The cigarette bit comes across as product placement for cool points. You seem to want me to wonder what the burning is. Could I call it chainsmoking? (Again, more product placement). How is the running like the burning, especially if it's cold and wet? Running, hiding/from the ghost I have become is a little melodramatic. There's too much imagery and not enough content. How am I supposed to care about the ghost you have become if you're purposely obscuring all details of that to me? Can stars be "dimmed out"?

Wasn't a poem.

"His soul was stretched across the sky"

Yes. It's poetry. One must take the abstract and mix it with the concrete (read: literal) in order to be eloquent.

There's a difference between a carefully considered artistic choice and one informed by a lack of grammatical, linguistic, or philosophical awareness.

>Yes. It's poetry. One must take the abstract and mix it with the concrete

???
it's the exact opposite

>3.Don't use such an expression as 'dim lands of peace'. It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.
>4.Go in fear of abstractions. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don't think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.

I know... you were describing the concept. I was telling you that I liked the concept but the execution of the poem was off. I felt kind of bad but now it's clear you're dim m8. You really are strikingly dumb

The imagery was meant to set a peaceful place which I had actually found myself in when I reached partial inspiration. The synchrony from the old orange lamplight and my cigarette was beautiful under the stars, amplified by the faint country music.

The burning is tying the lung burning from the chainsmoking to a burning in your lungs you might have from running. The running, is running from my problems. In this way I meant to directly tie my chainsmoking to running from my problems.

The ghost, that is me, is about personal issues I face with depersonalization.

By saying I was >now< under a headlight that dimmed the stars, I meant to say I was thrown back into a loud, bright world where I could no longer see the stars or hear the music that was peaceful to begin. By flickering, it shows a return to the normal state, from the temporary relief I gave myself.

I should have specified the burning as lung burning and the connections might have been more clear.

IT'S DEATHDEATHDEATHDEATH

Well.. I haven't even really seriously written any poem at all. I'm also a fairly emotionally lacking person so that didn't help.

If I was honest the whole thing was lacking effort. I wrote it in a very short amount of time. I apologize.

I'm really fucking confused who is talking to me right now.

First one reads like black metal lyrics.
The second one's decent (aside from rhyming day with yesterday) in that I can visualize what the feel of the dream was like. Just be wary of word salad unless you know what you're doing. Forcing a "poetic sound" is a mistake too many amateurs make.

I thought there was 2 of us?

No, it's not the opposite. If you're going for comparisons, you can say something like "the rock was like an elephant" or some other simile or metaphor, but you must have a concrete, physical known to do this. You can't say "his love was like philosophy" because you're just mixing two very vague concepts together (unless you're purposefully trying to be vague)

I'll be honest, I didn't even read the dudes poem, which I assume was bad enough that even you saw it was terrible.

I mean, did you write the comment that I was dim and then change your mind? It's chill I'm not offended. I'm just gonna rationalize it as a miscommunication thing, so no hard feelings. But, if anything, isn't that your point entirely? That the concept is great but the communication is poor?

Well, it's all a matter of mechanics then, ain't it? It's like weightlifting; I just need to do more.

>the cryptic nature of its message, if there even is one
Pretty sure it's about an early morning sight of a machine in a newly cut redwood forest. That's what I gathered, anyway. Quite good.

Yeah I wasn't sure. The last two lines confused me because when I think of sphynx, I think of desert, and then the rest of the poem I'm trying to relate sphynx to it and it causes confusion.

I thought the same, actually. Then I figured he just wanted to romanticize the morning. Take my opinion with a grain of salt, this is my first poetry thread.

Same. I wonder how many people come here and it's their first time?

I don't think there's such a thing as "regulars" in these boards. Perhaps someone should make a compilation of all the best poems here, with critiques, and name it "Poets from the Underground"?

Still looking for thoughts on any of these

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.

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 behind trees, the great truth in the glint of a trout,
the space left by the lake in a forest. The light is on.
But how far outside can you carry the 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 you know it’s imaginary,
illusory, fanciful as a parliament of faeries —
here, chapter one’s chance is no chess move,
and no one can arrange the lines of a life.

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 conspiracies onto your senses,
front to back and back to front at once
and all inside an instant is found in once upon a time.
Let the fabric of your vision keep its paranoia for now.
There is something at the edges. Something.

East:
>Before they breach the rainshadow

>Which rules beyond, where sky can speak
>The stupid blue of only sky,
I don't quite understand what was meant here. It seems vaguely metaphysical, but the imagery in the poem (which was great to this point) blurs. All of the language used is beautiful though

Glass of Water:
I honestly did not like this one at all.
>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.
Sounds awkward and the wrapping of the last word to the next line sounds jarring. The second stanza is much better but still.

Smoking Indoors:
>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
The picture is built up for the reader to imagine a hookah (especially open the glowing coals), and the switch to cigarette feels uncanny and breaks the flow.

Fortune Told:
>It burned a bit: right there, you see?
It left a mark; glows faintly in the dark
I would word it like this, but that's me. The next line is a rhyme as well so it doesn't break the scheme

I fucked up the greentext, but still readable. I swear i've been here for years

Can you elaborate a little more for me about which part of the imagery in East is blurring? Is it the “sky can speak”, or the “stupid blue” or what? I think the summer lounging bit is probably clear enough.

I totally get glass of water not working. I like it because the structure is strange and amusing.

I see what you’re saying about smoking indoors, maybe I can change the title so the reader expects cigarrettes earlier. But the flow breaking at the beginning of the second stanza should still be there, it breaks the grandiose mood of the first into the mundane plop at the end.

I’ll try out fortune told with your suggestions and see how it feels to me.

Thank you!