Bless you. When you say it i believe it. That is why i value you so much. Please don’t go anywhere. Respectfully Sandi
Poetry / Come Tour Castle Medulla Oblongata (Analysis)
Come Tour Castle Medulla oblongata
He says to her,
Step through the looking glass of my mind
Probe its nerve centers and you shall find
The enigma that is me, you seek
Is a game of hide and don’t peek
Come probe my cranial lands of seclusion
And paddle the muddy waters of my confusion
To a path where baby tree flourishes in a forest sublime
Near a castle of secrets on a steeped incline
Come walk through my neural path of self- destruction
Unfinished and under construction
But there is plenty here to view
Not every feature has gone askew
Come walk through my garden of prose
Where the seeds of cognition grow
But not every ovule doth sprout
Some are smothered by weeds of doubt
Come swim in my ocean of pain
And brave the restless currents of disdain
Many have drowned in my waters of curious tide
Never reaching the truthful sands of the other side
Then on to Castle Medulla oblongata
The dark corridor a gaping stomata
Turn to the left and you’ll find your quarters
I have given Dr. Pallium my orders
To fill your speculative prescription
Signed of course with my indecisive inscription
Notice yours is a room with a view
Decorated in roses just for you
See your portrait on oppicital chiffonier
It doesn’t favor you much at all, my dear
I fancied you more as a spirit
But your green eyes I do give some merit
For they have glimpsed underneath my darkened veil
My reflection wavers in your parietal well
But still you are lost in my tangled rhetoric
Come dear, Ill get you an anesthetic
Before we tour my inter-cranial cellar
The conditions they say are stellar
For vintage bottled resolutions
Sealed fermented conclusions
You may have a glass of wistful cider
Provided you can make it past the guarding spider
That spins her convoluted webbed synapse
Receptors of memory overload and collapse
Come tour my graveyard of memory
Many discarded relics of thought to see
Like the scattered bones of yesterdays trust
Picked clean by the buzzards of tomorrow and turned to dust
That’s your tomb over there by the babbling brook
I signed your name in the “loving memory” book
I will etch over your recollection with my amnesic pen
And erase every trail your introspective thoughts have ever been
For you are the worm in the apple of my seclusion
An unwanted reality in my optical illusion
Now off to my appointment with nurse Prozac, my carriage awaits
I mustn’t tarry with you any longer or I’ll be late
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Deadsage reviewed Version 1 -
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Sharp, clever, and intentive.
I am impressed, you’ve done good work here.
You should mind your syllable count a little closer, but that is barely noticed because as the reader I am engrossed in the pictures you are painting.
My Notes/Suggestions:
“Baby [trees] flourish in a forest sublime” – I found this grammar strange, and this line is a little syllable heavy.
”...on [steep] incline” -using a past tense didn’t work for me.
“But there is plenty here to view
Not every feature has gone askew” -Omit these lines, they are just filler.
“But not every ovule [will] sprout” -the use of “doth” doesn’t match the language around it.
“Many have drowned in my [waters’] curious tide
Never reaching truthful sands [on] the other side”
“I have given Dr. Pallium my orders” -I don’t know what this means. This whole section (after stomata… you don’t get back on track until the “darkened veil”)was a change of pace and tone. You seem to lose focus on this guided tour of your brain and start thinking of someone else who you want to see these sights. I felt as though I was reading a note intended for someone else. I would revise or even omit this section for another poem.
“I mustn’t tarry …” -tarry is an odd word, on top of that you have been giving a guided tour, not “waiting” as tarry would imply
“but you me you’ll never find.” -I think you had a typo here. I’m not sure what you were aiming for.
- add/view comments (4)
Spriglief reviewed Version 1 -
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To wordy, example:
Enter the looking glass and…
Probe the nerve centers of my mind
Seek the enigma of me
It’s a game of hid and seek
No sneaking!
We are in secluded cranial lands.
Brevity forces you to be a better writer. I have the same meaning with your 38 words to my 32. As you can see it is a moderate improvement.
I did change the word “peeking” to sneaking because I felt this was a logic conflict. You did invite the reader into your mind and I feel what your really wanted was mental teasing rather then say, the teasing of wandering hands.
I think the emotion and plot of your story is more important a rhyming pattern. Forced rhymes take away from the meaning. I am willing to miss a rhyme then force one. Good poetry is more then craft. Your structure and patterns should support what the poem is trying to do. With this, I think your rhymes should tease the reader. You did it here:
See your portrait on my retina’s wall
No it doesn’t favor you much at all
This does have lots of clever lines. Especially in the second half and I really enjoyed the “Prozac” plot twist. It was well worth my time. The few forced rhymes were minor pot holes in my read though this fine poem.
TerJa reviewed Version 1 -
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Damn, I hit something that erased my review. It was a good one too but I’m too lazy to try and retype the whole thing. I said, in short, there are a lot of errors in mechanics and usage and I doubt all are intentional. (-—yesterdays trust-—needs a positive for example)
Also, and maybe intentional,you invite me in and then call me the worm in the apple. Still, Lou Carroll would be proud. Rhyme on.
black313 reviewed Version 1 -
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extremely extreme, I know I’m suppose to quote part of this excursion through your mind, & in the end (yes I know it is like 2/3s way through but it is the end) she gets her prescription in the Castle. I call it the end because everything after that is automated like the processes of the medullaoblongata as if she dies there and the last third is the sad recollections of the first two thirds journey, does this make sense?
I liked the poem, quite a bit
Lalifufu reviewed Version 1 -
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Wow, what an imaginative poem! I really enjoyed reading this. However, I do think you need to do some work on it – with a bit of rewording and revision in places it will be perfect. I was blown away by some of your imagery. I especially loved the parts in your poem where you say “Come probe my cranial lands of seclusion / And paddle the muddy waters of my confusion”, the part where you talk about your neural path of self-destruction, how some are under construction and where you invited the reader to walk through your garden of prose where seeds of cognition grow. I also really enjoyed ‘touring’ your graveyard memory. That whole passage is beautiful, especially the part where you say: “I signed your name in the “loving memory” book / I will etch over your recollection with my amnesic pen / And erase every trail your introspective thoughts have ever been / For you are the worm in the apple of my seclusion /
An unwanted reality in my optical illusion.”
I’m not a huge fan of this kind of rhyming couplet scheme, as it reads in a very sing-song manner. (But that’s just my opinion – it’s completely subjective.) In some areas of your poem, the rhyme seems forced. For example: “See your portrait on my retina’s wall / No it doesn’t favor you much at all / I fancied you more as a spirit / But your green eyes I do give some merit” and “Before we tour my inter-cranial cellar / The conditions they say are stellar” and the last four lines: Now off to my appointment with Prozac, my carriage awaits / I mustn’t tarry with you any longer or I’ll be late / I find new solace in the forest sublime / Go ahead and seek, but you me you’ll never find.” (there’s a mistake there, by the way. You need to delete the ‘you’.)
You also alternate between (mostly) masculine rhyme and oblique rhyme – which is a bit jarring at times. I would revise this. It might flow a lot better if you stick to one style of rhyming scheme.
Also, some of the words you chose, I thought detracted from the overall intention of your poem. ie I thought the line “But not every ovule doth sprout” was a bit out of place. Everything else reads so easily, and then you suddenly delve into Old English in order to make the line rhyme.
I’d also change your couplet: “Many have drowned in my waters of curious tide / Never reaching the truthful sands of the other side” to “Many have drowned in the waters of my deceptive tide / Never reaching the truthful sands on the other side.”
This line also has a mistake in it: “Many discarded relics of thought to see” Thoughts should be plural.
This couplet can also be shortened to make reading easier: “Like the scattered bones of yesterdays trust / Picked clean by the buzzards of tomorrow and turned to dust.” I would take out ‘of tomorrow’ in the second line, as it isn’t really necessary, in my opinion. You can simply say “Picked clean by buzzards and turned to dust”.
There’s a consistency error that I don’t quite understand – maybe you can explain your overall intention and theme to me and it’ll be a lot clearer. It seems to me as though you wrote this poem as a tour of your brain as a whole. Is that correct? Why not change the title to: ‘Come Tour My Cerebrum’ or ‘A Tour of My Cerebral Valley’ or something along those lines… Because the Medulla Oblongata is the lowermost portion of the vertebrate brain, continuous with the spinal cord. It’s the area responsible for the control of respiration, circulation and certain other bodily functions. Memory storage, retrieval and so on are controlled by the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, as well as several other areas. And you talk about synapses and so on as well…
It seems to me as though you’re offering a guided tour of the entire cerebrum, not just parts of it.
Additionally, throughout the poem, you address the reader intimately as ‘you’(in a very conversational writing style) but then at the end you talk about the reader’s tomb and you imply that the reader is dead by saying you “signed your name in the loving memory book.” Then you go on to talk about etching recollections with your amnesic pen and erasing every trail… Then you say that you can’t tarry with me any longer because your carriage awaits…? It just seems a bit confusing. I think you should have a look at this and revise it. (I think you should change the part about the person’s name signed in the book to his or her – talk about it as though it is someone else, someone from your past, not the reader.)
I think your ending isn’t as strong as the beginning and middle of the poem. It seems like a bit of a cliche – you can seek but you’ll never find – and it also seems out of place with the overall ‘tour’ theme of the poem. I would edit the last four lines of your poem and write something else entirely.
Overall, you did well, though. I really enjoyed reading this!
Platytee reviewed Version 2 -
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Incredible. Obviously from a mind that’s not only educated but able to put together knowledge with art. My favorite line was:
“Then on to Castle Medulla oblongata
The dark corridor a gaping stomata”
Not sure if it was an artistic expression, but there was no punctuation. This leaves the reader to make their own stops and rhythm. Personally, I would add my own punctuation so that the reader isn’t confused or interpret your writing any which way they want. Just my thought though.
gemglitter reviewed Version 2 -
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Comments: Odd as it maybe, I love it. Though it threw me a bit because I have green eyes and it felt more real to me then lol. I love how you describe the insides like a garden/room and compare them to the actual organs. Like I said, I’m partial to how you use the eyes in the poem. Usually I say the rhyming doesn’t work well for a poem, but this one, it wouldn’t be the same without the rhyme.
Suggestions: On the rhyme veil and well is pushing it. I would perhaps find another word for either line. Maybe instead of veil spell? Another thing that I think might work for the structure of the poem, since you’re talking about the brain, is the stanza’s. The way the have your lines broken, if you create a stanza after each rhyme pair the poem will look like an EEG. Just a thought?
TerJa reviewed Version 2 -
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I did this one before so I’ll give a couple different suggestions this time.
First, while you create some marvelous word pictures. (really more sketch than picture) I love “buzzards of tomorrow.” Still, a couple of them miss me. (waters of curious tides for example)
Here and there I think you leave out a word, but with what you are doing here I am not quite sure. For example in line seven should there be an “a” before “baby?” or the fifth line from the end, which is almost incomprehensable as written.
Proof it again, you have something here, but it needs work.
loserlucky89 reviewed Version 2 -
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This poem is very well written and very relatable. It’s a story that just about anybody who has the comprehension of the story that’s being told can understand and feel close to. The only criticism I have is that it was a little repetitive.
sagittarius1212 reviewed Version 2 -
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Haunting…the calrity, imagery, and flow are all superb…wait, I have green eyes…
Donna
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