Poetry critique thread

need some constructive criticism
heres a poem i wrote:

this morning I woke up and made a cup of coffee
it was very black and bitter and too hot
I burned the roof of my mouth when I took a sip
I took a shower
the water was too hot and I burned my skin
I got in my car and drove to school and got flipped off by another driver
this made me angry so i fantasized pulling the desert eagle I keep in my glove compartment out and flashing it at the guy but I did not because I was afraid he would call my bluff and pull out a gun and shoot me and I would get killed over road rage and all the people at my funeral would feel
awkward because they know that I died over something so
trivial and useless

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=ZpA0l2WB86E
myredditvideos.com/
twitter.com/AnonBabble

like sages
he made birchen roots
of my feet
but willow leaves
of his own

so your bf cheated on you?
Am I interpreting this right ?

Life as a fuddy duddy,
A dad joke, and a
A lame duck.
Well no way, José
I'd be flyin' if I was lyin',
It's the rest of you that suck.

Dont remember if I posted this already

Suburban lights
Dance the Gymnopodie
Ad infinitum

Stars come to earth
Gods wreathed
In mortal coils

Suburban lights
Shine for your instant
Your false eternity

Your chord has struck
It rings
It fades
And you with it

Why did you dance?

peroty

I know a girl that cuts herself.
In silence and when she is most alone,
Calmly and exactly with sharpened blade,
She opens her veins: lets the scarlet blood
Flow before her admiring eyes. For one ecstatic
Moment, she forgets the self that she hates:
Seeing her blood and guilt being poured out.

. . .

Tell me,
Are you the priestess of the religion of your self?
Are you the sacrifice upon the altar of your skin?
Do you offer your blood in atonement to your self?
Well, this is a very modern cult!
But what does modernity know of religion?

Open the book and you will see:
“Without the shedding of blood,
There is no forgiveness of sins.”
So you are right, my dear, to desire the shedding of blood,
But – stupid woman! – you should know your blood is worthless!
How can your blood, stained with guilt, purify your conscience?

Come,
I will take you to a more ancient temple;
I will teach you the ways of our ancestors;
I will reveal to you a more holy rite and a more precious blood.

First, know this: that since the beginning of the world,
When man first sinned, there has always been the bloody sacrifice:
Upon altars made of stone, guiltless animals were tightly bound,
And with the sacred words said, and the sacred gestures made,
Taking the consecrated knife, the priest slaughtered the victim.
For the wage of sin is death, and even to this day:
The sins of men are crying to heaven for vengeance.

Now enter this temple, and see above this altar:
The body of the living God sacrificed upon the cross!
Look at him, look at him who bled for you!
See his gentle arms spread out,
His innocent hands pierced with nails,
See his feet, his head crowned with thorns,
See the Heart of the God of Love bleeding thick and red.
“Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away
The sin of the world.” Behold the true purification,
Behold the real purgation of your soul.
Behold this woman, Magdalene, a woman more filthy than you,
Behold how she repays his blood with the water of her tears!
Keep your sorry blood to yourself, and imitate this holy lady:
Pour out the perfume of your love upon his sacred body.
I want you to see yourself through his eyes.
I want to see you holy and pure like the angels.
Take this chalice of the blood of your redemption:

Drink it ’til you are drunk,
And let me never see you sober again.

abuse that day would throw at night
go’s through the clock then out of sight.

The rules by which we creatures meet
are plastered posters on the street.

misanthropy among the gods
mirrors the shame we feel as bards.

These are the dictum's that unite
the losers of the word with fright.

bump!

Broken Man Chili


1 1/2 cups Loneliness
2 oz. Friday Nights Alone™ whiskey
1 tsp Tears (without reason)
1 1/4 tbsp Childhood Memories
1/4 tsp Narcissistic Mother's™ Spices
1/3 cup Loomings of Inadequacy

In a large pot, combine tears with no reason, fond childhood memories when you're feeling sad, loomings of inadequency, and Narcissistic Mother's™ spices. Stir with an internet addiction. Add 1 1/2 cups of loneliness and bring it to a boil, then pour 2 oz. of "Friday Nights Alone" whiskey and let simmer on low heat through the weekend. Remove from heat and let chill for five days in an office job before serving with bitters to a disinterested Tinder match.

Serves 1.

Misanthropes*. Fix this line

The Loneliness of Time

His loneliness is a sea, the others are only bubbles.
He, who has in his breath a cosmic shroud,
Who blinds eagles and suns, dries souls and leaves,
Castrates mating-heats and volcanoes, silences the wind and the canary,

Gnaws the pans and the pyramids, muzzles the waltz
Of the clock and the galaxy, sour wine and veins,
He, Time, is a tyrant of false wickedness
That, without hate or pleasure, unravel our webs.

He loves creation, from the simple to the complex,
However his biography is a book of extinctions
That will ultimately make the cosmos a mirror without a reflection
Since Death rides upon his pulsations.

But when Death at last devours itself
Alone, surrounded by darkness, Time shall sit down
Without even Death with him to hold his hand:
His is the most sad of all incarnations of solitude.

The original

A Solidão do Tempo

Sua solidão é um mar, as outras são só bolhas.
Ele, que tem no alento um cósmico sudário,
Que cega águias e sóis, resseca almas e folhas,
Castra cios e vulcões, cala vento e canário,

Rói panela e pirâmide, amordaça a valsa
De relógio e galáxia, azeda vinho e veias,
Ele, o Tempo, é um tirano de maldade falsa
Que, sem ódio ou prazer, desmancha nossas teias.

Ele ama a criação, do simples ao complexo,
Porém sua biografia é um livro de extinções
Que enfim fará do cosmo espelho sem reflexo
Já que a Morte cavalga as suas pulsações.

Mas quanto a Morte por fim auto devorar-se
Sozinho, em meio ao breu, o Tempo há de sentar-se
Sem mesmo a morte para segurar-lhe a mão:
É a sua a mais triste encarnação da solidão.

A Discourse on True Love
(Set to the famous “Serenade” of Franz Schubert)

youtube.com/watch?v=ZpA0l2WB86E

I am shipwrecked on the island
Of your beauty.
I set sail romantically upon the sea of love,
Like a pirate looking for treasure beyond gold.
You called out to me with your siren song,
When you wore high heels on Saturday.
Wherefore my heart is broken,
’Tis broken, and ever shall be broken,
Unless you be the repair-person of my heart.
Come, my dearest, come unto me,
Together we shall study the heart’s machinery,
Together we shall be the technicians of romance.
Behold, I am your text-book,
And you are my hopeful student eager for an ‘A’.

O my darling,
Let me be your silver shining sword,
And you shall be my sheath, soft and snug.
Sharpness and softness thusly combined,
We shall experiment the meaning of True Love.
O Venus! O Mars!
Eternal feminine and masculine!
Eternal dance of opposite attraction!
Inexorable like the sun and moon,
Like the force of gravity invisble you pull me in.
My desire shall revolve eternally about you,
Forever until the planets themselves dissolve,
Or until it becomes awkward.

Alas, my love, alas!
If I tear out my aching heart,
And post it to you through the mail
Will you . . . appreciate it?
But my love for you
. . . is deeper than this even.

Be fair to Time. He's giving birth to things not just killing them. There was a time before you existed, before your time came.

Reposting this from a thread few weeks back, never got a response:

...

Threading to needle cloths a frock coat
a breath that expands and same fuels its expansion
a breath that takes itself just for you
and unravels with each pass through your lips
the weaving of you and the sinew.

Yet your own sips remain invisible;
the hollows 'neath the bars that form the cage
impress so easily; the blade therein discovered
compresses 'gainst a ruined carpus' pry
and serrati slips slip passively by.

The eyes dream an overcast sky.
Neither can be told the colour
of the destroyed under-shirt
to the coat discarded aside.
The prize of bruises is yet due.
The blows perhaps were one too few:
Down ticks the wrath five, four, three, two,
and with one, fractures off a tok-
en obal for the ferryman.

And then once I am empty-handed,
relieved, I linger with a pen
that wonders - if by the brok-
en rib it was - that your heart lived
again.

But he can’t avoid the destruction: it’s not his fault. That’s the point of the poem. The fact that he is alive and keeps on living is what sentences every other beings and forms (from ants to stars) to death. That is why his breath is a cosmic shroud: by breathing he colonizes all of creation with death. Time has the greatest of all burdens, for simply moving on with his live is to end all lives. Although he loves creation his own “to be” is the inexorable “not to be” of the entire cosmos.

It depends entirely on your cosmology. You can see Time either as the insane old man that devours his children; or as the devout handmaid that spins the wheel and brings her master's work to fulfilment.

I'm not an atheist so I don't think time is going to end in universal destruction.

transition of line two to line three gives me headaches


Work
In front
there on my desk
paper stays white
not doing this right
thoughts circle around
about you and what you
look like tonight, thoughts of holding you tight
come to my mind
make me go blind

Be advised:

There is a condition of the heart
That left untreated can cause serious damage
Or even death.

Symptoms may include:
Chest pains
Restlessness and insomnia
Racing thoughts and
an inability to focus on daily tasks
Delusions of a life with someone you've
barely
or never
interacted with
Inexplicable heart palpatations
during said interactions
or lack thereof
Extreme mood swings
characterized by sudden outbursts
of crying
or laughter
seemingly unprovoked
An unshakeable fixation
on a total stranger
Compulsory and atypical behavior
such as interrupting one's normal schedule
to force encounters
with the object of your fixation,
excessive spending
or gift giving,
and other grandiose gestures
conspicuous enough
that others may have noticed

If you or someone you know
have experienced any of the above symptoms,
Seek Help Immediately.
Be advised:
It is not Love
It is deadly.

Neato. I like it. Its not a traditional poem, but reminds me of the recipe posted earlier. Kudos to you for playing with the idea of what a poem can be.

Damn somebody had the same idea!
This is great though. Love the line about the Tinder match.

Oh yeas, it really depends of your point of view. I myself don’t have any opinion formed. I just had this idea for the poem and went on with it, more fascinated by the metaphors than by the possibility of sending a message. I guess that with topics such as love and time we can write several different poems (with different views), depending of the day.

I know that time today is known as space-time, and that physics by now have a much more precise definition of what time is (although I don’t know nothing about it – I’m still need to study that). But the fact is that time is, like death, a topic that lends itself to poetry with unmatched fertility.

The point is: the poem doesn’t contain my personal views about time (I don’t have nothing crystalized in my mind): it was just the fulfillment of the idea of the personification of time sitting alone in a dark desert of coldness and silence, after the death of the last stars, feeling alone but unable to die, and without even having the old entity of Death to sit beside him and hold his hand and say “don’t worry, let us spend eternity together”.

We must really be on the same mental page today, we even responded to each others' poems near simultaneously lol. Thanks by the way!

user, I hope you have a nice day.

Hey thanks user, I hope you do too.

Here are two haikus I wrote. The first one was for someone named Lunar who drew something for me

>the night
Soaring light, so free
Unseen at day, but the night
you'll own the world. Lunar

>The Sun
Heatwave embrace me
You big ball of fire, take me
Dance forever there

any particular reason why there is no punctuation in this entire poem?