I'm cold, I need the flames of ridicule to warm me up!
 

You look green
She said
All cold eyes and sunken cheeks
You look ill
She said
With a painted smile
I'm fine
Said I
My throat ablaze
I fell to the floor
All arms and legs
Tangled up like
Balls of wool
You look sad
She said
And closed my eyes for me.


I am well aware that it's nothing special and I would appreciate advice on how to improve it if at all possible. I haven't written for a good couple of years so I am very rusty. Be gentle with me, my fragile ego may never recover ;)

That is childish, but it's good. The mood you've created is excellent. I'm not kidding when I say this--reading this reminded me of being a child when my mom would be all drunk and cracked out.

Fix this, and make the rhythm match the serious of the tone.

I'm trying to rework it but I don't want to fall into the trap I used do which is getting overblown and losing what I originally started with. Might take me a few attempts but thanks for taking the time to read it.

Jesus UO, just damn.


I liked it MissC. Do you post poems often?

It's the first I've posted actually.

I kind of like this. It's a little rough, but form and rhythm comes easily with a little practice and knowledge. The hardest thing for a lot of people is capturing a mood without being too explicit - the whole show-don't-tell classic - and you pull that off well IMO.

I also agree with your approach - understated is way better than overblown, especially when you're either starting out or starting up again. I'd be interested to read more, if you keep writing.

Thanks. Even I can tell it's a bit rough round the edges, I just don't know what to do with it to make it better.I just started writing again after a period of writing nothing at all. I should dig out some of my older stuff for comparison. IMO, my old stuff is overblown and tried too hard. I like today's effort much better.

To be honest, I think this is short and simple enough that fucking around with it would be difficult without ruining it. Maybe the way to go from here is taking on board the weak points, and just writing more. I kind of think poetry is like singing in a sense - once you have the fundamentals, which you do, it's better to sing a range of different songs and move on even if they're not perfect, than it is to just hammer away at the first one you try.

Okay, since I've already told you what I like about it, I guess the only real weak point would be lack of flow. It's not very musical. that kind of works here, since the image it evokes (to me) has kind of a wind-up doll sort of feel, so the stilted flow doesn't work against the subject matter too much. But it could have been more rhythmic even in that context, I think. All you need to do is be aware of your stresses, which is why I personally find it's good to read poems aloud to yourself. if it's difficult to do without manufacturing pauses that don't come naturally, then a little tweaking is in order.

Thanks for the advice, I really do appreciate it. I've only just managed to drag myself out of the trap of trying to make everything rhyme, which, imo, is one of the things that made my previous attempts so poor.

I see what you mean about the lack of flow, it is a bit jumpy and not as musical as I'd like but I'm pleased that it turned out better than I thought it would :)

Reminds me of The Cure.

Yeah, I agree about rhyme - personally I find it pretty dated in present-day writing anyway, but it's so limited, it can really fuck with your writing if you're trying to improve.

I do like this though, and personally I think you should be pleased with it, especially if it's your first attempt in a while.

...what are you talking about?

That's what I thought!

Anyway, nice. I like the idea. It would've been easy to make this feel forced. If you hack away at it, I think it will, though.

You need practice. You should try writing every day.

Greetings Miss Cheyenne,

This is a mysterious, unsettling poem to me. It makes me think of someone poisoning a person that she knows and watching intently as she dies. I'd imagine that the meaning is symbolic.

Anyway, if you'd really appreciate some advice, perhaps I could give you something that might help you out (I hope).

Rhyming is indeed limiting, but it's quite straightforward. (The wider your vocabulary, the easier rhyming is to incorporate into your poetry.) On the other hand, rhythm is much more complex. Your rhythm is quite consistent here, but you could probably improve it in a few places. I have no formal education when it comes to poetry, but I do have a few techniques of my own that can simplify the process of creating or refining a poem. When dealing with rhythm, I like to draw a visual representation of the poem ~ writing it as a series of stressed and unstressed syllables (because that's all rhythm really is). You could say that from a rhythm standpoint, such a diagram is a "skeleton" of the poem. For convenience, I use 1's to represent unstressed syllables and 2's to represent stressed syllables. For example:

You look green--------------------> 2 1 2
She said--------------------------> 1 2
All cold eyes and sunken cheeks----> 2 1 2 1 2 1 2
You look ill------------------------> 2 1 2
She said--------------------------> 1 2
With a painted smile---------------> 2 1 2 1 2
I'm fine---------------------------> 1 2
Said I-----------------------------> 1 2 *
My throat ablaze------------------> 1 2 1 2
I fell to the floor-------------------> 1 2 1 1 2 *
All arms and legs-------------------> 1 2 1 2
Tangled up like--------------------> 2 1 2 1
Balls of wool-----------------------> 2 1 2
You look sad-----------------------> 2 1 2
She said---------------------------> 1 2
And closed my eyes for me.---------> 1 2 1 2 1 2

There are a few things that you could do to "tighten" this poem up (depending on how obsessive/compulsive you are), but I'd make two recommendations to start with: Firstly, notice how the line "I fell to the floor" has two unstressed syllables in a row? ("to" and "the"; articles and prepositions are almost always unstressed by the way.) Eliminate an unstressed syllable to make it flow by perhaps adjusting the line to "I hit the floor" (1 2 1 2). If you read it out loud with the rest of the poem, it flows better. Secondly, though it's not a rhythm issue, the line "Said I" throws me off a bit. Since you repeat the line "She said", you might want to keep that form by changing "Said I" to "I said" unless you have a specific reason for the inconsistency. (The other things that you could potentially do to hone the rhythm have to do with the transitions between lines as well as the actual number of syllables in each line.)

Anyway, I hope that at least some of this is useful to you. As has been stated here, one becomes a better poet through practice. Over time, a poet's work can grow more and more sophisticated.