Poetry / Living Dead

“Silver pool” and “orbs” lose me. I think you are looking in a mirror into your eyes. Like the line “What a crime…” Four lines later you use the word shroud; neat play on words.  Line that starts with “embracing” tripped me; it may need punctuation.  Line after that, I would cut “It was” and “that”.  Line starting “My corpse” could be tighter. “My cobwebbed grey corpse of a heart no longer…”?  Like the last line.  It reads like prose to me without punctuation.  I think you can chop some unnecessary language and utilize more complex grammar structure. It would make this a heavier piece, and the complexity would add to the weight of it.

Some beautiful imagery strung together, not exactly fluidly, but in that staccato, dream-like way, connected but not really flowing.

Some excess verbage that could be tightened, a little fat squeezed out, would make the tone and style more consistent and give the piece more forward momentum.

“loving and fearing the knowledge”
“corpse of a heart”

these are nice turns.  I liked goose bumps traversing, but there’s something absurd about goose bumps that is dissonant there, even though that IS the term for it.  What about “shiver”?  A shiver traverses…?

And I liked the close, the single drop of rain that mourns your death.  A tear.  Nice.

Good content. Good effort.

I get the feeling that you’re trying too hard here. There’s a lot packed onto the surface here, but underneath that, the piece feels kind of hollow. You do a great job creating detailed images – the sea green pool tinged with midnight blue, for one – but they don’t lead us anywhere involving. I think that if you dropped the current narrative – or maybe tried a tense change – you could add some real immediacy to the piece that seems to be lacking in this draft. “I tried desperately to look away” doesn’t do much for us – it’s not particularly vivid, it’s in very plain language, and the fact that it’s in the past tense lets us know that, regardless of the trauma involved, your narrator made it out okay.

I want to like this piece. I like the image of the oracle’s pool, I like the idea of being shown the orbs that were once the stars of a lover the narrator had wronged, I like the potential spookiness of these things striking back to kill… but I don’t like the way you present these things, honestly. The narrative lacks immediacy, and even if it were switched to present (or future) tense there would still be some distance between the events described and the reader’s attention. Maybe keep the narrative structure, but remove the excess words. Right now, you’re wordy – “It was only then, after the fight was lost, that I saw within myself” could carry more punch shortened to “i lost the fight and saw myself”. Bring it down to as few words as you can use to tell the same narrative, and see where there’s room to expand, where things start to feel thin, and base the next draft on that. There’s a good poem in here.

this is very finely lyrical. i like the long-line extension, and how it makes you keep your breath until the last and then releases you, simultanious to the thought in the line being released as conscious.

there are a few syntactical things i noticed, but i’m not going to mention them because i think they’ll appear to you too after a few reads; and they’re so “gestalt” like, so much a representation of how the author’s creative and thinking process works, that i think you’ll probably just write a new poem, and not add lumber to what is, really, a finely crafted house.

thanks for showing this.

mike

I like the way this piece reads like a story. There is one line that seems a bit too long

‘Loving and fearing the knowledge that it will never lie I look deep within’

Punctuation might do the trick, or perhaps split it into two lines and add to the second.

Its a good piece and flows well, even if a bit sad and morbid. The true extent of the morbidity is saved until the end and give the piece a bit of a hook.

I could feel these words pulling me down, in a good way. It’s very deep and I like how it seems you spent so much time on it.

very Poe, nicely written.  

An interesting piece that builds up with nicely penned descriptions and word choices, I must say, I especially love such poesy phrases as “a heart cobwebbed”, and the descriptions of the horror within this write.

“What a crime it is to murder someone from within” is my favorite line. I feel so lonely and sad when I read this poem. It seems like the subject of the poem is rotting away and cannot stop the sadness. I really like the word choices you use. I like the imagery and the line autonomy you create. I can tell that the enjambment is purposeful and I respect that. Overall, I really like this poem.

That’s a wonderful piece. I believe i understand your intent. It is the discovery of finding out that you have died emotionally/ Very well done!