Poetry Crit Thread

[Anonymous No.12141037]

New poetry crit thread, post your poems, give feedback, I'll start:

____________________________________

"Music heard from balcony"


peppermint leaves study
brown heat pooled in
earthenware mugs,

winks of honey drool
a finger stirs,
i taste their conversation—

acupuncture of twilight
beams stamp the balcony
fetal pink,

beside my seat,
an olive oil lamp eschews
flame with nietzschean angst.

a cellist in the street, her
crawling song wets
my heel with tongue-kiss

each note deflates a traffic light,
or cafe chatter,
mauve from aster on windowsill...

all die to song but rise again
as its reflection, as

a basin of pinot blanc,
negro
nymphs
lactating mango
hog's blood, charles mingus
indica
venus with cloven hoof
i

reach

for her breast,
as if it were an
algum branch.

torso approaching
overboard
braced on the railing

then

the olive oil lamp abruptly
sputtered
crimson fur,

“light upon light”, the words
waded through my skull—

the cellist interrupted by
that luminous choir.

i wouldn’t reach further,
i returned to my tea.

[Anonymous No.12141074]

>>12141037
Ring the horns before the crash of the drums,
Reign forever the promise,
only as long as does not perturbe the ageless splendor of it's denial.
The angry man is vain in his resentment of luxury as he toils,
and so he proceeds in vain of his resentment.
The happy man is foolish in his love of life, forgotten to that horrible heaping part of himself,
sprawled with constricting joints and bleeding that blood,
Pay he luck not to remember.
Always eager was accepted by the Earth.

Always downward impress the power and cascading mountains of the horizon.
Ever so that the dwindling height impresses the speck at the edge of it's microscopic lense.
From what pestle were ground these grains of what the body shivers to behold?
From what tree was made sacrifice and ripped the shreds of this beautiful scenery?
From what point does the needle steer it's compass,
Pulsates the ebb of the magma of power.

The excretions of raw turmoil brews,
Below the vats of anamorphic hell was raised,
And up was risen high and low,
and behold that it was seen.
The slumber had encroached upon itself,
Flitting it's tail at the flies and leftovers of the night.
The spoils of day at hand make clear the path of the arm.
I am stretched about it's expanse and yearn the pangs of inward loss.
The melting hot aftermath boils my blood dark and red,
I am ready to sanctify these old bones with new fire.
I lurch my eyes upon the stocks and bundles,
I am in love.

Flesh loathes the indulgence of the mind,
masked in the light by its submission.
I have made acquaintance with the tonic of breath upon the bellows of breast,
I met the waves that mirror this and thine.
Well met are they, and I said that it was good!
To the heavens which impress me impress myself!
Know my mind you manifold of high towers!
Know me that lightning had stricken the chapels of your Kingdom, my name in blazing stars.
Know my name to the inextricable folds of your searching rebuttal.
And behold my pride,
erected there with bricks I would bet against mountains.
Was my blood so bold to creep back whence it came?
If not so, then was made slave to my own boldness.
So there it was,
and so wept the Earth for a thousand years.

Tears falter to the sun, and my cheek is dry.
You know me, but what are you hiding?
Amongst the flags of nation's the sweat of day unfurled,
There in the depths must be hidden.
Feed me or be refused the exhilaration of my tongue.
Set loose the fruit into my view,
I will do the rest.
Having filled my bucket of what belongs to me, harken to my plea for more,
To the adoption of my whimsy,
flicking fast the worm of yesterday.
I had worms in my thin stomach.
Aside it, the froth of snails had savored,
molding the lowest of all my opinion.
Better is the least of my gripes,
entrust me this day or all days hence I will mock you.
The threat twas modest now cast into hard metal for the shackles of a generation of tender feet.
What had inspired now falters,
I can weep no more.

[Anonymous No.12141305]

>>12141074

Too bardic and antiquated in tone and diction to be enjoyable as a contemporary work. You know how to construct a fluid sentence and that's good, but the subject matter and overall language are abrasively archaic to a genuinely impenetrable point. You are not a bad writer by any means, don't think that at all, however, you've no sense of sincerity, spontaneity, or any of the necessary qualities to be an enticing poet in this work. I'm not saying it or you are hopeless, but you must think more of the 21st century and not the 19th when you're writing otherwise it is utterly pointless to share with anyone but yourself. Update the language, aesthetics, and tone, then you will (hopefully) be able to write a good poem. Good luck.

[Anonymous No.12141332]

>>12141037
there's no coherent rhythm or musicality. you occasionally have a series of lines that work but the majority of the poem is a garbled mess. i would suggest reading your work out loud as you're composing it.

[Anonymous No.12141417]

hit
or miss
I guess they
never
miss

(huh. . ?)

[Anonymous No.12141653]

>>12141037
>lactating mango
mmmh... Mango Tiddies!

[Anonymous No.12141704]

The new cathedral overlooking the park
looked down from its tower
with great eyes today and saw
by the decorative lake a group of people
staring curiously at the corpse
of a suicide--Peaceful dead young man
the money they have put into the stones
has been spent to teach men of
life's austerity. You died
and teach us the same lesson.
You seem a cathedral, celebrant of
the naked spring that shivers for me
among the long black trees

[Anonymous No.12141725]

BLIFFY GOT THE STIFFY
ROUND IT HOLDS FIFTY
YUH

[Anonymous No.12141821]

>>12141704

Clean and somberly poignant, I like it, reminds me of Rilke. Weirdly though, I can't help but feel that it isn't totally sincere, something about the poem's essence feels contrived, as if it's TRYING to put on that Germanic solemnity. As much as I enjoy the poem, it does not feel so much like an individual wrote it but one who knows how to adequately imitate what he's read. Take what you may of this of course, it doesn't have to ring true, but at least consider the fact that, although it is good, it doesn't "stand out".

[Ringer No.12141853]

Warble water whispers whooshing
Floating foam far from its home,
Wishing swishing swills could will a way to wander backwards.

[Anonymous No.12141909]

for gabsy bee: sunnybright romps through rainfalling-rain feed vinespreads

goes to smith then calls moz “cuck/”—while i’m feeding my guts with music:
coughing it up into untouchable aggrandizations of folk: your honesty
inquires . . . like what it’s like to always be mice at pictures . . .

wispy angely surface! engrossing betweens . . . trusting
gravity’s lonesome rasp about your sleeping struggle . . .
a woman wrestling a grand-circus of papers!/onyx-stone hairs:
aqua-marinestone sighting-stones! whispery-wisp sass unplacid as european
thrill . . . hydroplanar child, mirrory & story-child, child of the glancing
magazine, your lousing ways magnetizing every child of the gardening
sun, lively life-child pouting like storming grainy-jupiter . . . placetime
longs like fog for your criminal face-child! lapsing in pools
with ledged gibraltars!/founder of silkishly tempers)—juggler
of intentional anothers . . . “& if you come & see me you
will upset the order . . .” fencing a directional intention—
‘fraidened me belonging to every noun in our play louder
than muscles can make, & child of oceans in enduring
song . . .

[Anonymous No.12141996]

>>12141909

fun and whimsical but not interesting/enticing enough to get away with the pompous absurdity

>>12141853

i get that you're playing with sounds but you're doing it in a boring way

warble waters whispers whooshing is clunky regardless of alliteration, assonance, consonance, etc.

same goes for the rest of the poem, it's playful but not clever

[Anonymous No.12142174]

first experiment in prose poetry, would appreciate feedback :)


And then there was nothing not a cruel wandering of mine that wasnt fastened by your brown rippled locks tangled in your creamy lecherous skin a calm vase you were wine red and dark as the taste of meat I lowered myself over you I lowered my lips my greasy hair my light I was light then so light my skin was a valve just as yours was only letting our soul free when we felt one another's warmth then we wandered freely in each other as in a dream waking back in our own body each morning on your undone sheets I had known the taste of meat the taste of wine the deep red skies of dawn were smeared over us awakening weakening the night leaving this frozen earth we woke and ripped pieces of ourselves and fed them to one another like pieces of bread drinking extra pulp orange juice drinking also the paling orange dawn the swaying ochre gasses of the lamppost hung near the window we held our tepid bodies close defeaning the pulplessness of the world for long instants I could not breathe the pulp of your heart beat hard against my chin long gusts of you entered my lungs I held them in until my mind went numb and we left that room again I was dizzy with the indelible snowy smell of your tongue I was gouged out of my body by the air your pristine presence left I was preyed upon by a crow who knew me dead already I had known just then that I would never be whole without your wine-coated love.

And thus not an instant did I not believe every inch of me belonged to you my green blue eyes my veins were ropes my skin was sailcloth you sailed me into the whale's mouth the deep red and pink opening of the night free of anything anything anything you were you breathed that was all I ever was and needed Ah and much later when our kisses turned to wasps that was also true when we put our clothes back on and turned toward the day that was also true when your wine turned back into blood that was also true when all I said and believed of my love for you dispersed and the snow dried over the snowbroken grass that was also true when the black and blue crow came and plucked out of my navel the clammy moist unending worm you had stuffed there that was also true but when the windows of my soul shook for the last time and howled like seagulls silvery as your almond eyes soutaned in mascara I heard the Alamandas blooming so yellow and lax billowing bushes as far as the eye can see and you were not among them.

[Anonymous No.12142224]

>>12142174 is me, I will do some critiques quickly.
>>12141853
fun, but mind the clogged rhythms and I don't feel as if the substance comes through very well (at least I could not figure out an immediate meaning).

>>12141704
I also liked this. I'm not sure the end of the poem does it justice- it feels powerful but not quite exactly what would tie the knot. I think its the "shivers for me", the intrusion of the speaker makes this a bit too disparate and left me unsure of what the final sentiment you intended is.

[Anonymous No.12142256]

>>12141037
A man has told me God is good,
and stands above all men,
that he will never cast us forth,
though drenched with lust and sin,
That though we heed him little,
and pursue our own accord
he will not seek our bane nor yet,
unsheath his deadly sword
that he forgives excesses
and will not our prayers reject.

There was rumor in Gomorrah,
to that very same effect.

A friend avers that government,
has all our cares in mind.
And will not neglect the comfort of
the poor, the halt, the blind.
he maintains unreservedly,
his faith in policy.
to bring the fruits of honor to
the strong the just, the free.
he says the great in power seek
the profit of all men

It was mentioned in Treblinka,
but I did not heed it then.

Technology will save us,
i have heard a stranger say.
The wonderment of science,
skill, and tools will win the day.
Our comfort and our safety
we may leave to wise devices.
And men who build and train them up,
will coddle all our vices.
they’ll see the future clearly
and avert all waiting dooms.

I think I heard it spoken in
The Titanic’s smoking rooms.

The forgiveness of the strong is great,
I’m sure most men agree.
The wisest and the best of us
will surely all be free.
the bold men, wise in letters
with their eye on public weal.
will never be cast out or forced
their knowledge to conceal.
Time alters soon the hearts of kings,
and all will be put right.

I heard it in the Gulag
almost every single night.

So go forth with the banner
of redemption wafting high
and shout the slogan “Liberty!”
in land and sea and sky.
Of justice, peace, forgiveness, love,
proclaim the coming reign.
And cry the truth to power,
and the vanity of gain
That mercy always triumphs,
and that men will all be free.

Go tell them in Gomorrah,
but you didn’t come from me.

[Anonymous No.12142324]

>>12142174

not terrible but more or less unreadable, the hasty, brooding music you have going on is interesting but not enough to carry how poor the language is. there's nothing wrong with being pretentious in your art, but if you're going to be, you may as well have enough talent to supplement it and make it tolerable, if not an enhancer to the piece. but this does no such thing. it's verbose and undesirably bleak without much redemption. I suggest taking yourself a little less seriously and learning to develop an interesting language before getting all dark and moody or whatever in your writing. Humble your voice until you've learned enough to take it further. As of now, you're very far from what this wants to be.

[Anonymous No.12142349]

>>12142256

the content is boring and contrived and that debases the poem before one can even attempt to appreciate it. do not try to be "deep" in your poetry, especially not as a twenty-something on lit of all boards, just WRITE. Write something pretty, or sad, or surreal, or something, but do not capsize yourself by trying to be profound in any right, you're only hindering yourself.

Aside from that, the diction is anachronistic and frankly, flat. Everything about this needs to be left in whatever century it's meant to imitate. You need to go back to the drawing board and think of something that is relevant to our zeitgeist and not embarrassingly affected.

[Anonymous No.12142577]

>>12142349
>our zeitgeist

really, anon, really? Theoretically, in the internet age, any mention of a closely monitored and moderated societal narative should be laughed at and dismissed, esoecially on this board of all places. To say 'just write' is the most moronic statement, how else did the other anon produce the poem?

Wait, this is bait, isn't it?


On the third Sunday
I took a sliver from my thumb
while cutting vegetables for lunch.

It rested on the table
beside a chunk of carrot
and I thought for a moment I should
throw it in the pot.

[Anonymous No.12142683]

Let's do a riff, then.
When she came dashing in the door
I kept my steady gaze. It ended there,
Fate had won and Mona Lisa smiled
No laughs this sweet day. Amor, Vida de mi Vida, untouched by sun or night, it is I, dear, to march us astray.

You haven't kissed the lightest wisp of heather hair from darkened lips.
A lover's only watched and heard
Your toes slip down, I aim to miss
Your shining eyes each damned day apart.

Oh no, oh no, what can I do
To keep myself from scarring you?
I can't go back, it's that I fear
The world that moves without my bliss, I'm selfish; you're perfect,
You must stay right here.

This one, it's her, who laughed at no
Other boy's jokes, dropped pens for
Them to pick up, hemmed a dress for prom so to pretend to not have fun. A wonder bred for games and songs.

Be cruel, come back another day.
Your eyes belie wisdom. Forget!
Your fingers are sure. Be less!
I only wish to hear, speak slow, I'll listen, your tongue revealing ancient texts.

Now you have your book, oh no,
You laugh, oh no,
I smile, oh no,
The blood in the middle of your lip,
How could I resist...

[Anonymous No.12142709]

>>12142349
>he doesn’t know

[Anonymous No.12142717]

>>12141037
“Pray What is the news from Babylon?
Does Xerxes ancient town,
Still hold inside the Lion’s Pride?
where once the world bowed down?”
“There is no tale of Babylon,
that great long-storied land
The Lion’s gates are broken now.
The fields are choked with sand”

“You Tread the Path from Illion
Where gods and men did greet,
Does Priams mighty fortress still,
Show all assault defeat?”
“What gods have sown, the raven reaps,
I offer you no joy
‘neath broken stones her treasure sleeps
I bear no news of Troy.”

“Speak, pilgrim, of Jerusalem,
I know you passed that way.
The palmer’s badge adorns you yet:
does David’s line hold sway?”
“Where prophets sowed the seed of love,
the weeds of hate now grow:
the peace that was Jerusalem
was broken long ago.”

“well, traveller, What of Camelot?
does Arthur’s blood still reign?
Do boldy go the shining knights
across the feudal plain?”
“A trusted friend’s betrayal;
a bastard’s vaunting greed.
The moon that watches camelot
sees stones upon a mead.”


“Good host, I beg you, ask no more
you waken in my mind
the shadows of vain, fallen hopes
I fain would leave behind.
You long for comfort; this I know,
that grandeur might abide,
that strength of stone and arms and hearts
can bear the waxing tide,
And Gilgamesh the strong yet stands
upon his mighty wall.
That works endure the waning sands,
that towers might not fall.
Content yourself that legends live
where men are just or brave,
and deeds of lives may yet survive
their castles in the grave.
I will not comfort you with hopes
that Rome may live again;
don’t ask me of Tenochtitlan,
I’ve no news from Berlin.
In sorrow I depart you now;
regretting lenten cheer.
But the road is long
towards London town,
i cannot linger here.”

[Anonymous No.12142753]

first place

I'd write you a poem
about the madness of our times
but instead I'll drink some
chrysanthenum tea
and remember the fact that
Trombe's theme
replaces boss battle themes
in most of the Super Robot series
and that in itself might be
a relief to you reading this

see it's fucking easy
never say that poetry's
difficult challenging
or impossible
just get used to spacing
maybe find someone
fall in love
i don't know ffs

if i knew the path to wisdom
why would i be writing poetry
pray for safe journeys
world
universe
step

[Anonymous No.12142879]

>>12142753
you aight white boy

[Anonymous No.12143699]

>>12142577

You're over complicating it. To say "our zeitgest" in this context, especially when the entirety of the crit was based on the poem sounding archaic and contrived, simply means to be more contemporary. It's not a matter of pinpointing the total human experience of our time but being relevant to at least one in both form and sentiment. "Just WRITE" is should not have been so hard to figure out anon, again, the entire poem was so blatantly put-on, I'm just asking him to write without be so terribly affected with whatever bardic essence he's masquerading.

[Anonymous No.12143718]

>>12142753

This is really bad. I get that it's meant to be colloquial and I suppose contrarian but it does so in a very uninspired way. You're mocking poetry but aren't showing that you have any grounds to do so. It's fine if you want to make fun of things and be experimental, but don't do that before you actually learn how to write properly otherwise it just comes off as lazy and pretentious. "never say that poetry's difficult challenging or impossible', yeah, it's not when you don't have any consideration for refining your craft, as you've so gauchely displayed here.

It's good that you WANT to think outside the box and innovate though, keep that energy, when you learn to write and become a decent poet, it'll do you very well. Keep trying.

[Anonymous No.12144122]

>>12141037
R-Rupi?

[Anonymous No.12144216]

>>12142349

newfag

[Anonymous No.12144735]

I'm trying to write a sonnet a day. Here is my second one, from yesterday. I'll give any critiques that I think might be helpful in the next post.

[Anonymous No.12144777]

>>12144735
Well, I have already improved the third line. Here's my first sonnet.

[Anonymous No.12144791]

God
God i wanna fuck my wife again

[Anonymous No.12144797]

>>12142256
I like this one alot

[Anonymous No.12144814]

God.
God i wanna fuck my wife again.
If i could show the young me who he would eventually end up with,
he'd pump his fist,
as i do,
as always makes her laugh,
in the air
and it would make him happy
and hopeful as i never was.
Oh well, he'll end up here
when i am dead.

[Anonymous No.12144964]

>>12143718
>>12142349
>>12142324
I imagine this is all the same dude

What is the point of giving criticism if you just systematically destruct anything and everything the piece has to give? You should single out what is done well and what is not, how you would proceed instead and always keep in mind this is meant as a way for us to better one another as writers. There's no use trying to fit every poem in your views of what is proper poetry, easily dismissing everything but your own. A good reader takes part in the universe of the writer. We are all amateurs, you dont need to be so abrasive to get your point across.

I wonder if you do these criticism out of a care for other's work or as an ego trip, bringing others down to nurture your own sense of intellectual superiority. In any case, this type of criticism is just unproductive.

[Anonymous No.12145007]

>>12144777
I would remove the "Dear". It's a bit a cumbersome and it doesn't tell us anything that might not just as well be left in silence. Or have I missed something?

I really like it. Even the other one which I dont like makes me want to read more! Do you like Hart Crane?

[Anonymous No.12145233]

>>12144964

Yeah it's all me and no I don't do it to feel superior, it's just the language of crit I've been conditioned with and I've found most useful for myself. I personally think it helps to have your ego checked as thoroughly as possible as far as being a poet goes and in my opinion / experience harshness is the quickest way to do so. I'm not even a good writer myself, but I've been most helped by rigidness in feedback and figure others can benefit from it as well. I agree with you that there are other means of crit that can be effective but this is just what I prefer and have grown to find appropriate. A crit is a crit, there's no use in trying to micro-manage it, every piece of it should be thought about and either dismissed or considered. And I'm saying this as someone whose been terribly offended by the responses I've gotten on here. I've no desire to see any writer squander their potential, if I did I would say "stop writing", I just want everyone to grow and hone their craft to their best ability

[Anonymous No.12145252]

>>12144216
>>12142709

Ok I'll admit I look stupid as fuck for that, you got me on being illiterate and belligerent.

[Anonymous No.12145362]

I miss the frequent sips of wine
Upon rock beach bathed by moon divine
Cool glass of water by my coffee
And the cobblestone streets where I felt so free
Cigarettes between lips then timed my stay
We’ll see it again, some other day.

[Anonymous No.12145428]

>>12141417
This is unioronically really catchy teebeehaych

[Anonymous No.12145513]

>>12141332
What this anon said.

Also, a few things to note, which apply to you, but also apply to everyone ITT, I see some common issues in these threads.

It is almost always awkward for a series of nouns and adjectives to stand alone without some action. Most good and classic poetry uses verbs to create images.
Images are the cornerstone of poetry, and you should paint them succinctly, and they should clearly support your thesis.
You should have a thesis: a feeling, a picture, a theme, or whatever it is that convicts you to write. You should identify that thing and make sure your poem communicates it.
It is important to say what you really mean, you'll get good results from understanding your feelings. If you know what you want to say then you will say it.
There are many archaic sounding poems in these threads, and while they sound nice, they feel disingenuous and derivative. Nobody speaks like Milton anymore, and there is a good chance that most contemporary feelings and experiences of life do not merit that epic tone. This is to say that you should know your influences and recognize their presence in your work, as another way of finding out what you really want to say.

[Anonymous No.12145517]

>>12145233
I've had rude professors and I've never seen in any writing workshop this much unilaterally rude criticism. Litterally all you say is; this is not how I like poetry done, this is bad, learn how to write.

Ask yourself; where does the critiqued writer go from here? What does he work on improving himself and his piece in the immediate and how should he go about it. If your goal is simply to ego-check the writer, then thats not criticism. Some people come here simply to have a second opinion on their piece and polish the rougher edges of it.

Something being done in a kitsch style, being overdone, etc. should not deter you from appreciating it- writers imitate, often imitate what they read, even the best of them. Accept someone might be working in a mode or tone or diction that feels off and critique within that intention, in what they did right and wrong. Dont critique how that specific form is not esthetic in accordance to your principles of good writing. It serves no purpose.

[Anonymous No.12145520]

>>12143718

Thanks for the comment. Just to say that a critic should always be constructive with their criticism - there's already too much dark energy in the world.

>You're mocking poetry

Honestly didn't think so when writing it. I had just read some beat poetry.

But honestly thanks for the help.
I found it exciting to write something in 30 seconds that other people could mull over and comment on.

Keep on shitposting /lit/

[Anonymous No.12145525]

>>12141417
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVEdQJ7qtJw

[Anonymous No.12145528]

>>12142174
Try a revision, and this time use as few adjectives as you possibly can while still communicating your story. Not every noun needs an adjective, and not every verb needs an adverb.

[Anonymous No.12145553]

>>12145528
>>12142174
Also I wanna add that you really do have some great expressions here
>And thus not an instant did I not believe every inch of me belonged to you my green blue eyes my veins were ropes my skin was sailcloth you sailed me into the whale's mouth the deep red and pink opening of the night free of anything anything anything you were you breathed that was all I ever was and needed
This bit is really excellent to me, but then the rest of the paragraph carries on with a similar pace. I understand you want to make it sort stream-of-consciousness, but a few intermissions can help the reader relax and digest your feelings properly.

[Anonymous No.12145563]

>>12145517

That's fair, and I'll keep in mind what you say about allowing people the room to imitate, especially considering I did the same for most of my earlier writing. I guess I focus on it a lot because it doesn't seem like there's any consciousness of it being done. In the case of myself, I'd recognized I was archaic and wanted to improve that after it was called out a few times, so I basically just hope people here can have a similar reaction. I do think it's fair to critique how a form isn't in accordance with my preference however, because I'm the reader. I'm not ever trying to imply that my ruling is definitive, but that it is simply the impression their work had on me. The tone is supercilious because I'm a prick but that doesn't mean the poet needs to subscribe to its conviction (and I doubt anyone is anyway). One thing I've learned from posting on here is that one person will say "trash" and another will say "brilliant" in a matter of seconds, it's all a matter of preference and under that knowledge I think it's fine to make whichever judgement one pleases. So if I say "this needs to be made fresher, more relevant to our time", it's just as valid as someone saying "i love this, i really appreciate the 19th century Romantic vibe". But aside from that, you're right in that I need to be more scrupulous in my critiques and give people a bit more to work with, I'll try to do that more often. I do frequently try to make a point, even when it's something I'd deem anachronistic, that the poet does know how to construct sentences fluidly and he's not without potential. Iirc I said that to a couple people in this thread. It's never about solely putting people down, just that I happen to be finding more bad than good in what i'm reading here so that's what I talk about. I appreciate your opinion on the whole matter though.

[Anonymous No.12145588]

>>12145520

Mentioning beat poetry gives that poem more context for me, I see. Well, the brevity is evident and that's not to your benefit considering how cheeky it is. I'd be interested in reading something you've put more effort into.

[Anonymous No.12145607]

>>12144777
>>12144735
I think you've done a very good job, there are a few points where your meter is not totally correct, but for a day's work, it's good. Just be careful not to sink too deeply into outdated language.

[Anonymous No.12145608]

>>12145513

I agree with everything you mentioned in that second paragraph but I'm OP and wondering where you felt that the poem didn't adhere to what you're describing. A lot of the nouns do have verbs and the ones that don't are meant to be symbolic (whether or not that's working I'm interested in finding out).

peppermints leaves STUDY

winks of honey DROOL

twilight beams STAMP

each note DEFLATES

etc. etc. (all caps was for emphasis, sorry if it comes off as aggressive)

In regards to the music of it, idk. I feel that it's clunky in some spaces but for the most part I felt that I paid attention to rhythm decently enough. If you'd care to exemplify where it falls short it would be much appreciated. Thank you in any event.

[Anonymous No.12145670]

still tweaking this but whatever. I'm trying to write actual poetry instead of writing trash venting about how sad I am and how I miss my crush, etc.

---

I float comfortably
wrapped snug in the loops of the ivy
against the station-block cool
I see nothing but its brilliant red
burning in all possibility
where now?

[Anonymous No.12145722]

>>12145670

I like this, it's soft but not in a corny way or anything, it's genuine. The ending doesn't help at all, it disrupts the language prior to it and just isn't very evocative of anything interesting. I'd settle down with the abstractions too, "comfortably", "snug", you can reveal these qualities through images alone, you don't need to literally say that's how they make you feel. How are you floating that shows the reader it's with comfort? Describe that. You could even say "swaddled in loops of ivy" if you want to imply snugness without being so blatant, there are many choices here. "I see nothing but its brilliant red burning in all possibility" is a lovely line. Also, pay closer attention to the music of the poem, let's say you are going to go with "swaddled", you'd wanna say "swaddled in loops of ivy" not "in the" "of the". I mean, to say "the ivy" does create fun dramatic effect but at the expense of clunking up the line so, use things like that at your own risk. Keep trying to write "actual poetry" you're not bad.

[Anonymous No.12145727]

>>12145608
Yeah actually reading your poem I don't see many of those flaws. The line breaks were obscuring the sentences so I thought that some of them were just fragments and statements without action. the poem actually reads quite nicely when I take it slowly but none-the-less there seems to be some stiffness that I can't really put my finger on. Also in my opinion using a lowercase i manufacturers acquaintance that otherwise is not really present and I think you would do better to try and imply that quaintness through the words of your poem and not the capitalization. I think the way you established the structure of three line stanzas and it's kind of a meter was really nice and that you broke it later on in the phone really made it stand out. Maybe if you try and reinforce that structure then breaking it will be a little bit more impactful and maybe the phone will feel less stiff to me. I don't really know, these are just my feelings about the poem.

[Anonymous No.12145751]

>>12145670

imho contexually,
It's missing something lyrically
I can barely see
what the point is literally
forget the symmetry
no point in making tracks eurythmic'lly

it's not great and yet
still no great catastrophe
listen to some hip-hop/ wu tang
and then anon get back to me
now sincere apologies
stop talking in apostrophes
hurly burly done, get the indices
now for the drudgery


for the lyrics you seize:
don't do as you please, purveyor of cheese
dare to enter olive garden?
back to your crackers and brie, faker of chi

[Anonymous No.12145775]

You bring colour to my life,
When the world’s got nothing but greys.
You’re my rock in the ocean,
I want to pound you like the waves.

They can keep their fancy costumes,
They can keep their glowing neon.
When I look into your eyes,
I know I'm right where I belong.

When the storm is blowing strong,
I'll hold on to you.
When my heart is dead and hope is gone,
I’ll keep on going for you.

They may say our dreams aren’t real.
They may say dreams are a bunch of lies.
But there’s one thing I know,
When I look you in the eyes.

They may say our dreams don’t matter
But I know that’s not true
Because I’ve found my dream
And I know that it’s you.

When the storm is blowing strong,
I'll hold on to you.
When my heart is dead and hope is gone,
I’ll keep on going for you.

[Anonymous No.12145782]

>>12145727
*a quaintness not aquaintance

[Anonymous No.12145799]

>>12145775

get this guy a record deal, change the language a bit and this is pure radio fuel

>I want to pound you like the waves.

honestly reading this my sides have reached the stratosphere

[Anonymous No.12146031]

>>12145007
If you think it doesn’t tell you anything, then I would be very happy to remove it. I just wasn’t sure if the nature of the address is clear without it. How come the second one makes you want to read more even though you don’t like it? And of course, I love Hart Crane. I didn’t have him in mind while writing this though. I’m more interested in the symbolists and decadents at the moment (though of course these were important influences on Crane).

>>12145607

Thanks. I guess maybe I should force myself to do a perfectly regular pentameter, but I also like foot inversions and that kind of thing. What about the content though? Granted I let the rhymes do much of the talking for me, but I also went in with some idea of what I wanted to say.

[Anonymous No.12146097]

>>12146031
>But what about the content though?
Honestly, I am having difficulty figuring out what either sonnet is about. This could be my fault, I don't know. But especially In the first sonnet you posted, I see a few open quote marks that never get closed. Is this some kind of device?

[Anonymous No.12146100]

I walked down the street with my guardian angel.
We ate pizza, and talked about the music we'd make.
We got lost, and found, and watched a band.

[Anonymous No.12146207]

>>12146097
I adopted the old convention of beginning every stanza by the same speaker with an open quotation mark, to serve as a reminder that it is a dramatic monologue.

[Anonymous No.12146234]

>>12146207
Well, take my opinions with a big grain of salt then, it seems like you know more about sonnets than I do

[Anonymous No.12146242]

There is a streetlamp. It is
an orange streetlamp.
She is casting shadows of peach blossoms
On my wall.

I pour coffee that my father made.
He ground the beans
He put the grounds
In the filter
And I am sitting where a morning sun
Drags across the couch.

Three p.m. air smells like wet lavender.
We are hanging christmas lights.

I put my head deep in a pillow and
roll to one side, the north side.
and recall the breadth of me,
hand to hand, wide and tall.
And I think the wind
is creeping in my window.

I see shadows of branches
On my wall.

[Anonymous No.12146254]

>>12145563
I’m not who you replied to, but I agree with him. All your points of criticism may be valid, but it’s useless if you just leave the writer directionless and depressed. To enumerate your points, try occasionally picking an example from the work and specify how you would change it. The combination of knowing what to change and how to change it will allow the writer to understand your critique and will improve his work.

[Anonymous No.12146282]

Jamestown

A burning itch rises from the deep,
Rouses my hunger from its complacent sleep
Cast on shores, foreign and absurd
In the bowels of our ship a scream is heard
We embark upon this travel, bearing our heap
Our lust and yearning - tongue's unspoken word

Savage infinity cannot quell the flame
A hawk-like eye discerns the same
The memory of our Old rushes headlong into new
Diving, screeching terror, scourge from yonder blue
Firm hands are needed, Nature resists its tame
We unremitting predators shall shackle her, too

Construct by day, convene by fire at night
Pagan plans conjured in the bask of flame's light
Faces wore thinly like the living in graves
There is no freedom, no reprieve which saves
Such is our burden, our masks of great fright
These are the talismans to ward off the waves

Soon we must feed, appease that gaping maw
Manly virtue thwarted under winter's hoary thaw
Their cheeks grow weary and embalm the face
Rise, ye sinners! Leave ye this place!
Whither shall we run? We enemies of all law
Who know not the hearth's warmth, its loving embrace

Heathen temples mark our initial conquest
The pains of fate give us no soothing rest
Farther up the road we shall soon encamp
Gone is the frost, instead we feel damp
One way forward: that way is west
Where Nature's howling winds extinguish life's lamp

Nothing, whispers Nature, nothing for thy taking
Mine is a hollow chamber filled with violent shaking
The native dance turns wild, casts shadows on the heart
But ours is a destiny we cannot depart
Warn us no more, for that hunger is awaking
I beseech thee, death, to give life its start

Albion's summer distances itself still
A dim recollection to abate my will
Now the seeds are sewn for our earthly gain
Let us leave off nostalgia to wax and wane
I shall avenge dead memories, I shall plunder, destroy, and kill
We enslave implacable Nature, yoke it 'neath this pain

Like wildfire it spreads, this lunatic vision
Moonlit fancies ebb into derision
This new world is vast - vast beyond measure
All the more reason to rack from it pleasure
Energetic frenzy compels us to collision
With age-old bounty and untold treasure

So hark, noble fellows, take from Nature more.
Thy hands fit for grasping that superfluous whore
Wring from her bosom every ounce and drop
'Til those shadows come around her screaming shan't stop
Brandish new weapons, newer honors, for war
Rollest thou, ever onward, to the hard-fought top

(Pic is of Columbus but it still works for the poem)

[Anonymous No.12146453]

>>12146242

Quite pleasant, I enjoyed reading it. Only thing I'd say is to mind the rhythm a bit more. "She is casting shadows of peach blossoms" feels clunky to me, there's gotta be a way to truncate that and keep its sentiment. Although the poem is nice and clean, I'd say it only barely gets away with its lack of ambition. The sounds are nice, the images are soft, but it needs more life to it as a whole. Keep it up.

[Anonymous No.12146504]

>>12146453
I agree, your earnestness in conveying sense-impressions cannot be questioned, but there has to be SOME kind of import to your poem. This is not crystalline enough to be imagism.

[Anonymous No.12146541]

>>12146504
>>12146453
Thank you for the feedback. I'm really leaning into imagism, and writing what I know. I write about the things I think are beautiful. I wanted this poem to feel exactly how I feel, and to instill some peace in the reader. But a thesis or a point is probably necessary to carry the whole thing.

[Anonymous No.12146697]

The Cheeto Puff Man

Family sized bag
One bag for only one boy
So much pain inside

The Cheeto Puff Man
That is my name now I say
The bag is now gone

I am a monster
Each thing I touch turns cheesy
Someone help me please

Help me help me help
I know how it all will end
I must touch myself

Things are better now
Six months since the disaster
Now I cannot harm

[Anonymous No.12146704]

>>12146697
A modern take on Midas.

[Anonymous No.12146713]

>>12146282
anon if i look this up i can see you posted it on reddit. pls don't dox yourself.

[Anonymous No.12146715]

>>12146697
Best itt

[Anonymous No.12146764]

Against the Academicians

Little I thought they thought;
peer-reviewed and lifeless
I, making the soft ground beneath feet
feel more flat than round

Until those Viennese steps ran
Schlick with blood;
no longer positive,
returning instead to positivism

Again to Count Eberhard’s Hawthorn,
what of his little sprig?
the tree that is that is
holding only reverie

The ground feels round,
but oh will that Arctic circle be unbroken?

[Anonymous No.12146812]

Who resides in the warm lights of these hillsides?
What secrets veil the love signified in the neatness of their porches?
Easy, easy, a barking dog runs a fenceline
Its masters reside within, foretold
By automobiles and the status of paint

Who is the woman who talks in dreams to strangers?
Lately I have seen her, in Missouri and Colorado

She is a word that bridges an idea to my eye
She is a real image of imagination

3.03 for regular, 3:03 am
Aproned, unspectacular
Mother of God, amen

Magnificat, stolen aorist tense
We have seen the hidden liveliness
Residing in a fence

Other, self, neighbor
Time upended names
The horn of trains in autumn night
Silence also claims

[Anonymous No.12146874]

>>12146812
nah, stopped taking you seriously at the second line. secrets, veil, and love is too much abstraction for one line

[Anonymous No.12146880]

>>12146764
The tone is arrogant, there is no explanation of the againstness except a naming of who youre against. There is no argument whatever, only puns derived from key ideas/names associated with whom youre supposedly against.

An arrogant tone is fine but I expect it be backed up with brilliant rebuttals, not derivative and superficial punnery penetrable in a Google search.

[Anonymous No.12146887]

>>12145775
>i want to pound you like the waves

[Anonymous No.12146896]

>>12146880
Intention was to make it sound like it was written by a pseud who buys into conspiracy theories and what not, but yeah I suppose I should tone down the arrogance.
New to this so thanks for the criticism

[Anonymous No.12146898]

>>12146874

Oh theres plenty wrong with that poem, I suspect youre more able a critic than your reply suggests. Try again. Earn your hatred.

[Anonymous No.12146902]

>>12146896
I dont understand why anyone would attempt to write a poem whose major axis is the hidden stupidity of its own voice. I dont believe you. I think you are a pseud attempting to sound academic.

[Anonymous No.12146904]

>>12146887
Its a terrible pun. Waves pound. They are not pounded.

[Anonymous No.12146907]

>>12146902
I understand you thinking that, probably not the best idea for a poem. But do you think there would be a way to draw out what I was going for so people don't get the same impression you did? I thought the allusions to flat earthers and climate change denial were enough but maybe not.

[Anonymous No.12146925]

>>12146907
Gosh now youre really knotting my head up.

[Anonymous No.12146936]

Blessed mark the ember-eyes of local faces.
We meet them by the mill,
Clipping grass under their naked toes.
Jokes remind of nights like these,
The varied carols of crickets and paws.
Newspapers whistle spirals against the pants of passing folk.
Windows riddled with thick smoke run above storefronts and dim colors.
Chattering figures in the margins, fast talk,
Sightings of wolves,
Husks of goodbyes.
The hallway we entered leaves us now.
Licked by blue lights tickle the dark corners with shapes of floating yarn-bits.
Young men trade their supper-songs across a stained counter.
I hear an old mother thinking against the noise.
Favor our brood, oh father one.
Our tender stocks and little bundle-seeds.
Every prayer the same,
Stay the feral tooth of night.
Huddle close the sweetness of posterity.
Friendly whispers mimic the bustle of a growing brier.
I rouse my eyes and gaze the silver moon,
It shuts them closed.

[Anonymous No.12146979]

>>12146936
This seems like a list of more or less sequential observations in an insubstantial place. You could improve it a lot by chopping all the "I"s out.

[Anonymous No.12146993]

>>12146898
>try again
>earn
What's your problem dude? I'm not gonna spend even more of my time on bad art. One dismissal suffices

[Anonymous No.12146997]

>>12146904
hey buddy, stop replying to me

[Anonymous No.12147004]

>>12146907

Not the anon who responded to you but as much as I wanna believe your claim about the poem, his impression rings more true. It's pompous and the irony of it isn't apparent at all. The language is high-register and, as we don't know you as a poet, we must take its expressions as more or less sincere. If you want the facetiousness to come across then, yes, you ought to be more blatant about it. What you're doing now isn't working at all.

[Anonymous No.12147024]

>>12147004
Totally understandable, I'm very new to all this and probably won't be able to make the irony come off as clear as I want it to be. I was thinking I would just get rid of the name drops and reference more conspiracy theories but now I'm kinda feeling like the idea isn't even that good in the first place.

[Anonymous No.12147092]

>>12147024
It could work, but I would recommend doing two things. 1) lower the register of the language, or maintain the high register and occasionally drop into an extremely low register for comic effect. 2) expand the poem, probably to at least twice the length. Irony needs to sink in and unless, as others have pointed out, you expect irony from the poet it's not usually the first place the mind goes when reading a line.

[Anonymous No.12147135]

>>12146812
I think that whatever point you mean to make here, barring that I missed something, could be distilled into like five lines. There's a lot of stuff to sort through. Complicated and verbose =/= poetic.

[Anonymous No.12147298]

a lot of these are 'too clever' for their own good, a little too keen to prove their poetic worth, that sort of thing. though it's not like I'm any better

[Anonymous No.12147324]

>>12147135
>whatever point you mean to make here

I wrote this in 2-3 minutes. There is no point at all.

[Anonymous No.12147335]

Poetry is trash

[Anonymous No.12147358]

>>12147324
are you proud of giving so little a shit? does producing pointless trash gratify you?

[Anonymous No.12147362]

>>12147335

You are trash, you are a feeble minded brainlet incapable of bringing himself up to the difficult task of understanding the idiomatic capacity of language, no, even worse you are so consumed by the glory of your own mediocre aprehension of language (ie, your aprehension of reality itself) that you shrink in the face of the possibility of your being a peanut and deny the glory of the sun in the acidic dirt that crumbles your leaves which might otherwise sing the strange praises of a reality crystalline and essentially beyond the grasp of meaning itself but endlessly approximate to it, the laudato of taller flowers with greater and lesser colors and thorns falling by the way nearby and sinking into the composted self consumption of your own obscene bloom verifying merely the fact of sun and vagination and depriving the existence of floral things blooming spectacular altogether. You are worse than trash, you are the heaping pettines of last summer's gardens dead in the snow and called only to life by the plowing of mere men.

[Anonymous No.12147389]

>>12147358
I give more of a shit than you, and my shitting out things shows as much, and I take a little pride in that, yes.

[Anonymous No.12147411]

>>12147389
>"i give more of a shit than you"
>writes 3 minute instapoetry
you don't even know how much you don't know, bucko

[Anonymous No.12147417]

>>12147411
Prove me wrong, idiot. Make me feel tiny and shameful. You won't.

[Anonymous No.12147496]

Finished this today:

Complaint

Why is it that whenever I talk with the duchess
My belly growls and my nose waters? Why must it
Be my hand that tumbles her wine glass over
Into the Cellini salt dish?

Stiff as a gaffer, fidgety as a child,
After twenty years of struggling to be a courtier
I remain incapable of the least politeness,
Wit, song, or learning,

And I wonder sometimes, what is it in me that hates me?
Is it that rolling captain who should burst
Like surf into her presence, dumping down
His pillage of the seas,

And in a wink dissolve her castled pride?
She scorns no common magic, and could be pleased
To be manhandled like a kitchen-girl,
So it were sweet and reckless.

Or is it that idolatrous fool that's in me,
Who, lest she alter, should enchant the hour
With gentled sparrows and an aimless lute,
Enthralling her with tales

Of a King's daughter bound in mountain sleep,
Whose prince and wakener, detained by trials
In deserts, deeps, and grottoes of the world,
Approaches her forever?

Or am I spited by the priest I might be,
There in the stone grove of her oratory?
No ship sails out so free as she at prayer,
With head bowed and shrouded.

[Anonymous No.12147541]

>>12147496

Not bad alltogether, though I think one could go much farther with this theme, pursuing the antagonisms of masculine assertion and a timid submission before woman to a much more shocking or reconciled conclusion, rather than ending on ellipses as I think you've done. The last two lines mean nothing to me.

"To be manhandled like a kitchen-girl" strikes me as a weak line.

I rolled my eyes at Cellini but appreciated the echo in "like surf into her presence, dumping down / his pillage of the seas", though I think its her pillage, not his.

[Anonymous No.12147556]

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers -
Untouched by Morning -
and untouched by noon -
Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection,
Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone -

Grand go the Years,
In the Crescent above them -
Worlds scoop their Arcs -
and Firmaments - row -
Diadems - drop -
And Doges surrender -
Soundless as Dots,
On a Disk of Snow.

[Anonymous No.12147560]

Hanging there in the starless night, it speaks of a world known but unseen; A mirror to the light of day, so that the stars of man know the brevity of their days.

Can someone help me with this one? Using day twice is bugging the shit out of me.

[Anonymous No.12147568]

>>12141037
Down the road we walked
Like brothers, once were we.
Our roads diverge
Never to merge.
Down the road we walk.

[Anonymous No.12147582]

>>12147568
Awful and effortless.
>>12147556
>rafters of satin and roofs of stone
Nice
Overall message: its all really big
A difficult notion to put in poetry, and here could certainly be expanded. There is a wink of irony in likening "dots on a disk of snow" to planetary orbits which I like. Not a bad ending but ended before it got going.

>>12147560
Use a synecdoche for day (sun, sunlight, light, brightness etc)

[Anonymous No.12147594]

>>12147582
>A mirror to the light of brightness
I love it

[Anonymous No.12147607]

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

[Anonymous No.12147638]

>>12147607
How is she covering her face with sheet that had a hole cut in it for her mouth?

Gross and cucky, did not like or laugh.

[Anonymous No.12147667]

>>12141037

I like my poetry threads like I like my egg creams

[Anonymous No.12147815]

Niggas iffy (uh)
Blicky got a stiffy (uh)

[Anonymous No.12147827]

>>12147815
Intriguing. What was your inspiration for this piece.

[Anonymous No.12148105]

>>12141037

Too Many Words Thread

[Anonymous No.12148295]

Is it the same anon critiquing all of these? I'm referring to the proper critiques too. I think there might be two but even so I would love to speak to either of you or even both if I could.

[Anonymous No.12148504]

>>12148295

I think it's a few people, but I'm not sure which you're referring to.

[Anonymous No.12148617]

>>12146904
I'm saying the love of my life is "Like my rock in the ocean", and rocks in the ocean get pounded by waves, so I'm also saying I want to fuck her.
Do you get it yet?

[Anonymous No.12148739]

>>12148617
Yes, I didnt read your stupid poem, I read his single green text line. Try writing a real poem.

[Anonymous No.12148905]

>>12145722
Thank you anon, you give good feedback. I'm not satisfied with the ending either, I've changed it several times but haven't found a good one yet. I wish I could end it on the previous line but it sounds too abrupt that way imo.

[Anonymous No.12148960]

>>12147607
why do you post this in the critique thread? do you sincerely get pleasure out of seeing that some random doesn't recognize stevens? maybe you are a pseud who got critiqued too hard and you want to discount all of /lit/ with this tactic of yours. i don't fuckn know. bad post, faggot

[Anonymous No.12148983]

>>12148739
oh hey it's you again. greentext anon here. as i implied earlier, an hero your'e self

[Anonymous No.12149899]

>>12148983
No

[Anonymous No.12149919]

I stare into widen pupils, her screen,
As wind blows, trees denuded show their pure
Demeanor, hair whirling as if they were
To follow leaves displaying shades of green.
I stumble on her face: sight of pristine
Beauty; howling wind was silenced. Secure
and free, my mind dripping into the future
that could have been if only He had been
a bit more... crimson leaflets surge the air.
Her face dissolves bit by bit; remains her hair.

[Anonymous No.12150784]

has anyone on /lit/ ever been published? seeing how all you people write like it's the eighteenth century I'm doubtful

[Anonymous No.12150893]

>>12141037
How do I into poem?

[Anonymous No.12150946]

>>12150893
Easy, you just start typing away furiously and your unconscious will take over like this and that back into the fray frayed forked tongue spattering nonsense and babble Tower of Babel hanging gardens of the whore of Babylon the gate of nineveh nunavut indian eskimo of the first nation live there up by lakes with igloos and such but who can be assured of such a fallacy red herring fallacy all around they may cut down trees with those herrings don't you know yes poetry i remember it fondly i would fondle it fondly also hold it in hand and ask it various questions about yesterday's lunch or what he wanted to do this afternoon no reply as usual so leave, go, begone, return never

[Anonymous No.12150954]

>>12150784
Tao Lin posts here, so does Houellebecq

[Anonymous No.12150968]

you got
a
boyfriend . .. .?
i bet
he does
n't
kiss ya. . .

[Anonymous No.12151034]

Elephants steeped in blue
Waterweaved more than you
For a breeze they yearn
Into rain to turn

[Anonymous No.12151051]

>>12150954
not poets

[Anonymous No.12151052]

A smelly dump
Heaped o' the lump;
Fetid air inhaled,
To my genoux[1] I slump.

[1] genoux: French for 'knees'.

[Anonymous No.12151057]

>>12151052

are you french?

[Anonymous No.12151099]

>>12150946
Anon you are allowed to stop and direct your thoughts once in a while.... *takes deep breath*...

Or risk rambling a schizophrenic dynasty rank ordered to curtail the effect of a world beyond control but easily subdued in analysis, of repeating words and trapping oneself in the circular loop of a thought leading like a cul de sac back to its origin ad infinitum, in finite mightyness substrates of a fountain of words pouring out in an order arranged by a force which is not musical but categorizes etymologies in a haphazard fashion and gathers relations between things causally removed but for the benefit of man to remind those who have forgotten of the intertwining of all things enmenshed entangled and poorly removes from the current of nature into the ideological morphisms of a glaciated culture scarring petrified being into mountains and morraine rivers.

[Anonymous No.12151389]

>>12141037
AHEMMMMMM *loudly clears throught*
AHUHUHUMMHMMM *this goes on for several seconds*
HRMMLLLHRMHMM
HUMMMM
*ah*

Alligator

When a gator bites a person, rolls and tears away a limb
The person is to blame for this; their provocation made it bite.
The alligator only did the very thing it always does,
Maimed to eat, and ate to live; it's never had another choice.

On the other hand, if I so much as tried to clamp my jaws
Firmly to another's arm in order that I might eat it,
I would go to jail and see no sunny swamps for years.

Now we have two options we can choose from, listen carefully:
Either lock the violent gators off, or let me bite with freedom.

I prefer the gators face no trouble; I admire the gator attitude.

[Anonymous No.12151402]

>>12151389

the humor feels affected and weirdly pompous, not us funny as it should've been honestly

[Anonymous No.12151483]

Their happy portrait
On the wall faded by age...
She pleads for more time

Darkness past midday
More bitters in my whiskey
And temperament

A dark formation
What I mistake for bombers
Are low flying birds

Fragmented white shell
Armadillos hard armor
Is useless in death

Cold breeze in the air
Deer walking along brown grass
Jump over the fence

[Anonymous No.12151491]

>>12151402
Yeah I get what you mean. I feel that way about all my writing, and I wish it wasn't like that. I am aware of it even as I write, but am not yet skilled enough to do anything about it.

[Anonymous No.12151506]

>>12151491

The self-awareness is a very good start. Maybe try a more colloquial language, it might help. Breaking out of insincere registers is hard but once you do things become a lot more fluid. Besides, the concept is fun, the execution is all that needs touching up. Keep trying.

[Anonymous No.12151517]

As spider silk, a moment lost--
Two voices in then 'croaching frost
Spoke dread in charms of finery.
I could not hear; I would not see.

[Anonymous No.12151572]

>>12148105
Made me laugh
>>12147556
Really liked this one
>>12144814
Sides are gone

[Anonymous No.12151627]

I dream my death a friend to life,
That sprites of good-will animate
A few things touched in slapdash fate,
But of this malice and short sight
Which find my blood as I live on,
Let naught be found once I am gone.

My shadow beaten: though it seems
The process drudges, time will toil
And strip with lathes of wind-whipped soil
This bone and free the blood to seep downstream —
To ferry blights I did not speak,
To wither, gurgling in the creek.

Indecent slime to flesh of fish
Whose bones will grind to feed the loam,
I lay in lime a keystone home
For fledgling life, which keeps this wish:
That they might meet on fertile ground,
That man reborn who finds his love unbound.

***

Trying something simpler + more optimistic. Not pleased with first stanza, but happy to rhyme 'fish' and 'wish'. Always enjoy these threads.

[Anonymous No.12151645]

>>12150968
kinda sick desu

[Anonymous No.12151664]

>>12141037
speckled skies lay feverently on a never ended coast line
a love seagull carrying a gun walks upon the limitless ridge
*a plop*
a gambler appears from the water
is he smiling because he is evil?
we are handed money by him and a gold tooth falls from his skull
*leaves promptly*
not long before a serpent beckons
aiding his call a high calibur sniper bullet buries into the sand near his grin
little reason to stay
munich is a nice city

[Anonymous No.12151687]

>>12145775
I picture this at its best as nothing but the cheeky first stanza on a single page.
>>12144814
Every line is stark taken on its own, but the whole is worth pondering over. Really enjoy it.
>>12151389
>>12151491
You could rework 'on the other hand' and line 8.
>>12151517
Keep coming back to it. Giving the metaphor primacy on the first line really leaves the reader hanging on the concept & action that follows.

[Anonymous No.12152950]

>>12148504
Any of them really. I thought it was just one person at first, but I'd like to speak to someone who's actually interested in and educated about literature and poetry for a change. I mean, they have to be.

[Anonymous No.12152965]

Egypt be gypped.

[Anonymous No.12152981]

>>12151687
Thanks man, my heart like levitated getting that kind of response

[Anonymous No.12153001]

I got a phone call from your mother today.
Her lips were pursed and candied, I'd say.
I couldn't see her between the borders of states,
but she told me I should let go of the blame.

She called me up to build me higher than I've felt for the longest day.
We spoke a while and dreamt on a nostalgic plane.
She told me sweetly that her memories of her daughter
involve me, too, in some way.
She lingered with each breath as if to sigh,
before she told me she used to lie awake.
Rue in her wrinkles for having turned me away.
From your funeral that long-gone but not forgotten day.

Her sighs turned to shudders and her facade of being a mother
shattered like chalky, kiln pressured Ohio Valley clay.
She sobbed through hysterics and left me feeling desperate
of feeling a similar love for the ghost I'll leave behind
with a note lengthened in a shakily scrawled essay.

It was pure and powerful to hear the shake.
In her voice as it pronounced my three syllable name.
Hoping she got my number right,
not knowing there's a reason I've not cared to change.
Today I got the answer to a question I never thought to say.
Speaking is important to lighten how the emotions weigh.
She told me I should let go of the blame.

But you knew me best, better than they.
I can't quit the blame.
But I can lie to her for her own sake.
So she can move on and feel less of the dismay.
No parent should ever outlive their own flesh given.
The sound of her voice like a subdued painful frisson.
I told her a lie to keep her spirits intact.
To keep alive a promise whose corners are bent, but without crack.
I know you'd let me out of any dotted line I signed if I wanted
free of your Faustian contract,
But I digress,
I'm a mess.
Full of shame for how I handled you and your name.
I've written and talked about you like you were an old flame.
I tried moving on,
but all the old noises I hear them new, and all the same.
Your ghost has followed me because I asked, and you came.

I love you,
I miss you.
I'll come play with you in space.

[Anonymous No.12153009]

>>12153001
too many people just write stream of consciousness diary prose with a few rhymes in it then try to give it some random visual structure so it looks like a poem.

[Anonymous No.12153012]

>>12153009
robert lowell destroyed poetry.

[Anonymous No.12153015]

>>12153009
People doing a thing doesn't make it bad unless you're trying to cultivate a nonconforming aesthetic. Somehow doubt poetry is popular enough that "too many people" doing anything with it is bad.

>>12153001
this is fucking awful though and seems way too awkwardly personal and needlessly introspective without saying much

[Anonymous No.12153018]

Chimes bid farewell as the last wind to ever end,
blows its final charms through the hairs on our arms.

Walls, with bubbled fire gleeful for escape scratch-
out etches of their own cave paintings. I'll remember you.

Times hid beneath a soft surface the soul's foreign purpose,
to explore the alien that is land beyond here, a future mere.

Struck dumb, deaf, congenital heart murmurs and other gossips.
Fogged out windows bottomed at the last ends of an emptied quarry.

We dug the new digs and the careful resemblance to a rhyme we like to sing-
along to, in lieu of the high notes we contort brows and eyes high for a few.

This tumult of twenties gleam in stark contrast.
Made heavier with temptations, I forgot everything.

Finally tired of the past I find the future narrowing before my salted vision.
Too late to change course,
reef ourselves, then. The wind has harrowed a billow the last of its kind.
We are now safely where we must be, were told to go, were held and pointed
to by arms hairier than ours then, "That is your place in this world."
Carried across the sea in a pity as a great wind,
carried us, too, across the sky.

We act as rupture on this virginity.
A land with no wind is too new.
God, please, tell me what to do.
Guide me in, again.

[Anonymous No.12153023]

>>12153015
when i say too many people are doing it is bad... its because that style makes bad poetry. particularly when the structure has no logic at all and looks terrifying like that poem.

[Anonymous No.12153034]

>>12153023
If you want logic then get good at math. If you want strict adherence to structure then ignore anything written after the late 19th century. There's more shamefully baroque poetry I see posted than streams. Of course if all you read are the 100 poems that get posted once a week on /lit/ you wouldn't see that.

[Anonymous No.12153083]

>>12153034
im not talking down to unstructured poetry. im talking about specific types of bad poetry where people just write a diary entry, use a few descriptive words and bad rhyme then add some random structure to it so it looks like a poem when its not. its banal stuff and is egocentric in the sense that it does far more for the writer than the reader because of its confessional nature.

[Anonymous No.12153138]

>>12153083
How can a poem simultaneously be a stream of consciousness diary entry and have structure and rhyme added afterwards? Also, you think Homer, Donne, Wallace, Blake, or Yeats didn't write from an egocentric viewpoint?

If, down to its bare minimum, art is about emotion then to write from the ego is to be the most honest. Anybody with a basic understanding of scheme and meter alongside time and a thesaurus could write a dishonestly baroque poem about the Great Fall of Man. Tennyson's Ulysses is hardly like Ammons' Garbage, but they both utilize stream of consciousness relating to synonymous thematics. And over a century separates the two.

If you want to talk solely about bad poetry then have at it, but to say an entire writing style based on emotion is bad because it doesn't follow a logical process then you are stuck in a specific frame of the past. This isn't even including epistolary writing which has churned out, arguably, some of the greatest writing of the last few hundred years and follows egocentric writer-driven confessionals as its mainstay.

It'd be harder for me to find good writing written without being self-centered than with. Poetry or otherwise.

[Anonymous No.12153235]

>>12153138
I was basically saying the poem sounds like angsty teen poetry. and what i described is basically what that is. a diary entry written straight out of the head with some descriptive words, bad rhyme and the put in an arbitrary visual structure.

im not saying or insinuating anything about any other poets or poetry styles. just bad teen angst poetry.

and yes emotion is fine... infact anything is fine... if its written well.

and i dont mean egocentric as in just from the self point of view. obviously most poetry is. i just mean that that type of poetry satisfies the writer more than the reader. especially because it is personal.

[Anonymous No.12153267]

>>12147556

Am I really going to be the first one to point out that this fella just posted an Emily Dickinson poem?

[Anonymous No.12153270]

>>12141037
The phone is ringing and I cannot Linger.
Look out butt, here comes my finger.

[Anonymous No.12153277]

>>12153235
Let's line up all the descriptions you've used to critique >>12153001 (sorry for putting your poem on blast)
>stream of consciousness
>diary prose
>random visual structure
>looks like a poem (faux poetry)
>bad
>illogical structure
>terrifying
>bad rhyme
>random structure
>banal
>egocentric
>confessional
>angsty
>teenage
>arbitrary visuals

Couldn't name a single novel, play, essay, song, or poem (let alone the authors thereof) worth reading that wouldn't meet at least half of these descriptors. That's going back all the way to the Greeks. Critique can be objective. If you disagree then you adhere to a strictly pre-postmodernist demand for purism in art while subjecting your entire viewpoint to a postmodernist subjectivity of critique. A better term for you to use is masturbatory if you mean to imply the writer is more satisfied from their writing than the audience. But at that point you've let your critique die on the hill of absolute opinion.

PS: which poems are yours in the thread, I'd like to read your writing.

[Anonymous No.12153336]

>>12153267
... holy shit
we're all fucking pseuds. Good that you pointed that out anon

>>12147556
You fuckin hack, game over

[Anonymous No.12153387]

>>12153277
yes descriptors can apply to multitudes of different things and topics as language is redundant... but then you clearly dont (or refuse) to understand me.
ive not taken a view on how poetry should be done in general. im talking about a particular type of bad poetry. im really sorry if ive used words which are so ambiguous theyre confusing to you but ive tried my best in the last post to specify what i mean.


>Critique can be objective. If you disagree then you adhere to a strictly pre-postmodernist demand for purism in art while subjecting your entire viewpoint to a postmodernist subjectivity of critique.

i dont really get what youre trying to say here or why you are saying it. and like i said i wasnt making any general points about poetry.


>masturbatory
a less ambiguous description nonetheless i think its abit histrionic compared to what i actually mean.

>But at that point you've let your critique die on the hill of absolute opinion
what do you mean?

>PS
I havent got a poem on here

[Anonymous No.12153459]

>>12141037

As heard in the twilight, footsteps beside me in the snow

Hood over her eyes, nose fresh with the red of roses

I tapped her head gently, dusting off the snow

Frozen in that transient second, for an eternity to behold

[Anonymous No.12153489]

>>12153387
pseud fuck

[Anonymous No.12153596]

>>12153489
whats pseud about that? you mad?

[Anonymous No.12153760]

I fell down from the moon
or your eyes i don't know
I can see your hearth
or fell I don't know
Your wrath can demolish
or Eliminate
perhaps ulliminate
Mayas wrote this
technology can not stop this

Feels like didn't finished yet. Maybe because of my native language

[Anonymous No.12153840]

I like my train
comes from the hill
never check my ticket
so black guy deal weed
ı light my cigar with the
warmness of my pimp

[Anonymous No.12153860]

>>12153760
>or
>or
>or
too many ors for my taste. feels like you don't know shit what's going on. I just like my poets clear-sighted like DJ Trump likes his veterans to be winners.

[Anonymous No.12154470]

>>12142324
t. Dunning-Kruger

[Anonymous No.12154588]

>>12146282
Only real complaint I have is the meter is a bit wonky at times and in some places you seem a bit shackled by trying to maintain the rhyme scheme but I enjoyed everything else.
I very much like the diction and the subject matter, you did an excellent job of conveying the feeling of a journey to a foregin land with all the struggles and triumphs it entails.
I don't often screencap poems but this will be one of them.

[Anonymous No.12154896]

>>12142174
i really like it. quite absurdist. dont take the others advice. couple awkward word couplings but they might even work in its favour and the rhyme, repetition and lack of punctuation or intermissions works i think. i wouldnt change it too much. dont listen to those other bourgeois assholes.

[Anonymous No.12155533]

>>12142717
This is good. It is a joy to read something in a proper meter. Nice composition of each stanza - and a nice break from the structure with the last one. It was a pleasant surprise that it turned away from the pessimism so prevalent in writings about this theme - well, if I am correct in reading "content" as an imperative and not as an adjective.
I regret that I am too much a pleb to see any flaws. You will have to do with praise from me.

[Anonymous No.12155544]

I'm writing a long alliterative longline poem. This is my opening. I'd like some feedback on both the technical aspects and on anything else that strikes you.


“To drag on a dragon’s draughtful digression
To swallow a swallow’s high swooping suggestion,”
These words were to wake me in winter.
I sat still, silver all slipping on the window.
Were those words at all worthy of wonder?
No. Naught but nostalgias with nonsense filled in,
Fragments I flayed but found empty.
Enough lines have existed each aeon,
That any I arrived to had aged.

The protagonist is going to go on to wander outside in the darkness thinking about these lines and poetry and be accosted by a dragon of doubt and a bird of aspiration before going back to bed.

[Anonymous No.12155817]

>>12155544
well what do you think of the meter?

your style already seems to have broken down by the second stanza.

also alliteration doesnt work in the last line of stanza 1 because all 3 target words use different vowel sounds. same with aeon on second last line.

also dr and d dont work in alliteration as dr begins with a "j" sound not a d.

[Anonymous No.12155829]

>>12155817
>>12155544
omg ha just realised thats not your second stanza -.- most of what i said still stands though.

[Anonymous No.12156006]

>>12155544
The alliteration is really funky, I like it. Intrigued by what a bird of aspiration could be.

This isn’t done yet, it’s a sort of prose poem/possibly could add a haiku at the end to wrap it up. Props if you can guess what it’s about.

An Ashen White Room (AS-204)

Dress rehearsal. Your last dress rehearsal. “Morning, Lola”. Your last “Morning, Lola”. Suiting up. Your last suiting up. Cantankerous asides. Your last cantankerous asides. Bacon and eggs. Your last bacon and eggs. Red gantry walk. Your last red gantry walk. Hatch slam. The last slamming of the hatch. 6:28pm. Your last 6:28pm.

6:28pm; 6:29pm; 6:30pm; 6;31pm
6:31pm
6:31:01pm…zap

The monster grew. It started as a sneeze, a stutter. A little orange spark, lurking beneath the command pilot’s seat. Perfect place, perfect time. It was to have a short existence of around twenty-five seconds. It could never write a poem, or crack a joke, or design a flying machine. It could only be born, grow, dance, consume, dance some more, grow some more, and then wilt and die.

This was a Fire. It had a cycle, like anything else. It appeared out of nowhere. And if the Fire was a living thing with a cycle of birth, everything in-between, and then death, then so was its host, the command module. The command module had a vascular system - mechanical-biological rhythms – constant electrical currents flowing through its copper veins.

[Anonymous No.12156564]

>>12155817
>>12156006
thanks m8s; I'll take this into account, especially the notes to mind my alliteration and assonance. though—minor note but aa/ax and aa/aa are both acceptable patterns to me. I only need drag/drag/draught to alliterate.
bird of aspiration is basically just an allegorical swallow that pushes him to dream big and hope, to write what he wants. it shows up first, gets eaten by the dragon, and then the dragon dies leaving the protagonist in the darkness of winter.
>>12156006
it's a toaster, I'm fairly sure. the bits before the times and after the times seem like separate poems, though. the style change from mourning to descriptive doesn't work for me

[Anonymous No.12156579]

>>12156006
er—not sure why I thought it was a household object. it's a rocket.

[Anonymous No.12156801]

When you are in the room your face is like the moon in a midnight sky;
It is all i see.
I cannot help but wish your light falling tenderly as a kiss upon me.
Your gaze is crisp and bright;
And in the dark of night I crave it so.
When I look up I see your eyes are not on me;
Your soft moonlight gazing upon he.
How can I but fall into a daze;
My moon has fallen down.
That light that once shown so bright is now but a dreamy visage late at night.

[Anonymous No.12156844]

>>12156801

Really liked it. Just two things

>Your soft moonlight gazing upon he.
using 'he' in order to rhyme it sounds awkward

>That light that once shown
did you mean shone?

[Anonymous No.12156913]

>>12156844
It really makes me happy that you liked it! :)
Yeah, the "he" is forced there, but I don't know how to improve it without changing too much...
And I did mean "shone". Thanks for catching that, and the feedback.

Can someone help me with punctuation? Should I be ending each line in a certain way? Are there rules in lyric poetry about how long lines should be, or any other major points of form?

[Anonymous No.12156968]

>>12156801
so who did you get cucked by fella? you okay?

[Anonymous No.12156986]

>>12156564
so thats it... his aspirations, hopes and dreams just destroyed? you fucking monster.

[Anonymous No.12156994]

>>12156968
No, I just got infatuated with a girl who didn't like me.

[Anonymous No.12157004]

>>12156994
worst feeling in the world. dont ket girls fuck with you. dont ever let them fuck you. you need your mind for greater things.

[Anonymous No.12157366]

>>12156986
well...I meant that the dragon dies because it ate the bird, which is poison to it. I've been rejected a lot lately, and I really feel like I'm not worth much as an intellectual who doesn't produce anything. but I'm still going to keep trying. that sort of feeling.

[Anonymous No.12157391]

>>12157004
>worst feeling in the world

Certain and impending death...?
Finding a girl you do like, falling in love and then discovering gradually she has a severe mental illness which cannot be treated and she slowly drifts into madness over the course of years...?
Discovering your entire family was burned alive in a horrible gas accident while you were out buying canned blueberries for a thanksgiving pie...?

I dunno anon

[Anonymous No.12157548]

>>12156801
I really hate poetry like this because it lacks any sort of story or emotion. it masquerades as being emotional but you have nothing to say other than 'the girl i like likes someone else'. you add really basic imagery but it doesn't reenforce any point it is just there to make it seem poetic. This isn't to say that you don't have a story to tell but you are refusing to tell it at all brother. across 10 lines all you said was 'i like girl. girl like someone else. me sad. also moon simile'.

please also commit to a rhyming structure or don't rhyme at all.

[Anonymous No.12157570]

>>12155544
when you start with a rhyme, even accidental, it sets up for a formula that you didn't hold on to, so id change either digression or suggestions.

It is really hard to say how strong PART of a poem is without the context of the whole. While someone can tell you if something is a good first page in a book, that is juts the way it is written and poetry is a lot more science than art, it is more like a screenplay than prose. It is less about what each line is like and more about how they fit into the big picture. posting only part of a screenplay is essentially useless outside of basic small structure notes, the kind you should only worry about if you are essentially new to the game.

[Anonymous No.12157582]

>>12153459
what does this poem mean to you? I am afraid to criticize without hearing any back story.

[Anonymous No.12157591]

I am having this one turned into a song, and while I imagine it will change in order to fit a tune regardless of what I do with it, I would appreciate any notes in touching this up.

[Anonymous No.12157619]

Et in
Here the garden pond lies still
Unmoving
Firmly held by the moss and lilies
And Time's ardent watch
Lets no life spring forth any longer

In Arcadia
Here the garden tree has cast off its fetters
Shade no more graces the wood
Dead, barren limbs
Sprawling roots vying for light
Oaks bury their face in shame

Et in Arcadia ego
And here the garden stone commands the eye
To look around its necessity
Unyielding, implacable
Verdant hills have taken leave
Hither stays his gaze

He is in Arcadia
Now, and forever

[Anonymous No.12157636]

>>12157619
tell me the story behind this one.

[Anonymous No.12157645]

Again filled with a nagging hunger for lost time
I claw at the remaining scraps of the day passed by
Sucking on the bones of the night
to squeeze the last drops of light
Knowing, but disregarding, that I would be better off sleeping now
And waking with a belly full of possibility
Instead I lick up the stream of colorful, empty pixels, a feast for the eyes but calorie free
Tomorrow, I will wake up tomorrow, groggy, unwell, famished,
stomach empty again.

[Anonymous No.12157653]

>>12157636
Et in Arcadia ego translates to "I was in Arcadia also", taken to mean that death is there even in the greatest paradise. I had an image of a english landscape garden with beautiful ponds and classical architecture and I heard the phrase.

[Anonymous No.12157654]

>>12157645
it starts off strong but really gets weak in the second half. I feel like there is more of a story you can tell here. you certainly tkae it a step forward by going for the pixels, but it really stands out with the metaphor being so persistent.

It feels like you are a serious redraft away from this being a true poem.

[Anonymous No.12157657]

>>12157653
is that all there is to it? just the idea that even in beautiful places people die?

[Anonymous No.12157672]

>>12157657
No it's not about people dying, but about Time and Nature. Maybe not the deepest of stuff, but I liked it.

[Anonymous No.12157679]

>>12157672
what about time and nature? there is no need to hold back, if poetry is meant to be subtle explaining poetry subtly misses the point of explaining it.

[Anonymous No.12157699]

>>12157679
You're right. To better explain I'll include a painting. You see these innocent naive shepherd boys in Arcadia, unaware of decay or suffering, and they happen upon this tomb with the inscription Et in Arcadia ego. The shepherds, the garden itself - all of it is Nature, something like Rousseau's idea of it anyway. Then, once they see that tomb, the idea of Time and decay is introduced to them, and their lives are the worse for it. Pond's become contaminated, trees lose their leaves, and the rock, that immovable past, bears down upon the entire garden.

[Anonymous No.12157704]

>>12157582

I was walking in the quad with this girl I like after we just finished classes. We were talking and having a good time. And it was also snowing so I gently patted away snow from her hair, and she froze for a split second, there was no expression on her face. She seemed really nervous for some reason. But right afterwards, we were talking and joking around again.

She neither pulled away or smiled at me as I did the head pat. What does that mean?

[Anonymous No.12157712]

>>12157704

Of course afterwards, she decided to pull her hood up as the snow got heavier.

[Anonymous No.12157719]

>>12157699
could you break down your poem in relation to that for me? stanza by stanza I mean. I find this really interesting. I may be wrong but it sounds like you have the reverse of what most amateur poets have here.

[Anonymous No.12157728]

>>12157704
>>12157712
I see. certainly not for me but it would be hasty for me to criticize.

[Anonymous No.12157733]

>>12157728

And of course I wrote this late at night while debussy clair de lune was playing, and it reminded me of walking in the snow with her.

So it was kind of hearing her footsteps in the twilight kind of thing.

I really like this girl, and it seems like her being nervous around me would mean she's crushing on me a little bit too right?

[Anonymous No.12157748]

>>12157733

Her being frozen in that short second, that image of her expressionless face is being kept on playing in my mind as I slowly lost my mind loving her.

[Anonymous No.12157749]

>>12157733
>while debussy clair de lune
I love Clar De Lune. this is going to sound stupid and edgy but you should listen to it backwards as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fc--bYgIb4

>I really like this girl, and it seems like her being nervous around me would mean she's crushing on me a little bit too right?
Hard to say. I'm more of a man's man and find most things about romance to be boring. my own poetry is generally about the people in my life, so mostly friends or mentors:
>>12157591


I can look beyond the romance aspect to judge poetry objectively, but yours seemed to offer nothing but the idea of romance and the idea of imagery. I feel a LOT of amateur poems do this. yours at least played with a concise moment instead of just the vagueness of a romantic feeling like others in this thread though.

[Anonymous No.12157760]

>>12157719
First stanza: The "Et in" I broke up like how Eliot does at the end of his Hollow Men, "For thine is...for thine is the". Then I had an image of a placid pond lying still, enclosed by time. This is only an afterthought by when I put Unmoving in a line of its own I wanted to drive home that particular word. Time is capitalized since I wanted it to be a clearly articulated subject, a person almost.

Second stanza: again, broke up the original phrase. I introduce my second symbol, the tree, and kill it. I was careful about "Shade no more graces the wood" since, for whatever reason, the word graces stuck out in my mind the entire time writing this. I had to choose a good spot for it. Sprawling roots was meant to show a sense of urgency, a last ditch effort to survive, to live or move against the stillness of Time.

Third stanza: Full phrase this time - completes the reading of the tomb inscription. Imagine that everything is happening as the shepherds are reading, though unbeknownst to them. The stone, of course, is the tomb itself. They realize that the pond and tree are dead and so too the stone, death incarnate, has killed them. In the background those "verdant hills" are retreating, running away from the stone.

[Anonymous No.12157761]

>>12157654
Thanks, this is good advice. As with most of my poems i didn't do much revising but I think you're spot on so I might try reworking it

[Anonymous No.12157766]

Build a bus, as you do, for that girl you like
Flowery metal petals, ground welded out like a sun
Belted out mechanized brutalities that, without
The big head, hammered back, oil greaser
Who keeps his hands clean now-a-days just so you know
Without him in full view shattered visors, in rust cut tape
Who’d you have? Agape - blue lit? Some tit? Unreal just so
Fertile ground looks growing up an outward spout
On a sunny mesa day

[Anonymous No.12157782]

>>12157761
I think simply transitioning out of that metaphor into the second stanza would fix a lot of the problems. or simply just not being as persistent with it. in your attempt to compare the desire for someone to hunger it just became about trying to talk about hunger without regard to the rest of the poems importance.

really after the 'light' it can be more or less removed and have your focus shift. beyond that I think there is a bit more of a story you can tell here. a lot of amateur poets try to write poems that are just thoughts or ideas. they think this makes their poetry 'accessible' but it is beyond accessible. it is generic. you are one step ahead of them by adding a bit of a progression with the scrolling through facebook (which is what oyu meant by pixels i assume) but its still just barely beyond an idea.

keep the first stanza (up through light) more or less as it is, and rework the rest into a second stanza and add a final 'act' for a third stanza. you got something to say there i think and being more precise will make this a true poem.

[Anonymous No.12157790]

The image of an orchid
Suspended in a reflecting pool
The prick of a hummingbird beak
Shatters the calm
Sends shards of orchid rippling across the surface

Greatness is not gained or lost
It is forged, through toil
Through the alchemy of words
Dripping out in molten iron
Hammered into shape,
Cooled with a sizzle

Each stroke is a mask
Each mask a sliver
Leafing through skins
Layers accreting, falling away
Like insect wings swept from a dusty windowsill

I peer through my curtains
At the neighbors across the street
Searching for something to watch on TV
They can't seem to decide
I join them in indecision
Torn between the perverse pleasure of peeping
And the productive flowering of words
As the night grows darker
And morning grows nearer
And all the weight of the world drags me further down into my uncomfortable bed

Each sentence splits opens a seam
For the voice I choke back daily
The voice that speaks in riddles
That avoids the petty pleasantries,
The small small small talk
--the private voice

The pressures of the city force the private voice deep into my throat
Headphones shut out the world
Music or not
The voice does not speak to be understood
--heard--
But not understood
It wants to provoke other private voices to awaken
To cut past the false-calm surface of the streets
Make manifest the latent content of humanity
Excavate the layers
Expand the network of signifiers

The voice that keeps you awake at night is the same one that begs to be given an outlet in art
You're not an insomniac because you are anxious
You're anxious because your inner voice goes too often unprocessed
It whispers to you in ways you can't understand, asking--indirectly, in thoughts, bodily sensations, illnesses--to be let out, dribbled out, slapped onto the counter and kneaded into something you can taste

Words, poetry, make for an easy translation
Images can be easy to make
But harder to fill with a voice
In all pictures there is someone who speaks
The task then is to find the one who speaks
Most often, pictures descend from the other's voice
Occasionally, we find ourselves in images
Words bend to our will more easily
We string them along into daisy chains and assert our individuality, though the chains bind us to prescripted meaning no matter how much we claim to escape it

I fear I've gone on too long already.
I look back on the poem that I'm preparing to post on an Indonesian basketweaving board
I sit up in my apartment, staring again into the window of my neighbor's room
I ponder the dynamics of myself, a white gentrifier new to Brooklyn, looking into the window of a black family who has been here for years
I wonder if writing poems to keep myself awake is a valid pasttime
This is probably why everyone hates white twentysomethings
Wondering if I belong here
If I can last in New York for a year
If I even want to
If I should kill myself
Thoughts calcify like drying candlewax
The neighbor's room goes dark
They've found something to watch

[Anonymous No.12157793]

>>12157790
can you tell me what the first stanza and the second stanza have to do with one another?

[Anonymous No.12157845]

>>12157749

Thanks, I'm actually not a poet, just an engineering student that write short bits sometimes.

I think so too, I didn't really give any of my insights out in the poem, it really wasn't even about love, it was just about capturing a very specific moment and me pondering what that moment meant whilst in the twilight.

Though many times I feel like I'm stuck in the wrong degree, and I wonder whether I could have became somebody with a better legacy if I gritted my teeth and pursued english during my last years in highschool.

The song played backwards just sounds really off, maybe like something I would enjoy if I played it alot of times and got used to it.

[Anonymous No.12157858]

>>12157845

Actually no, the poem is 100% about love.

[Anonymous No.12157864]

>>12157845
well very few people really are poets, but even as a hobby its important to make sure you are doing some sort of baseline if you intend to share it in any form without any warning. Poems are, at the end of the day, stories, and they need some sort of point to them. what you did was give us a first act, but you never really followed through.

I think the easiest example i can find is called 'first fig'
>my candle burns at both ends
>it will not last the night
>but ahh my foes, and ohh my friends
>it casts a lovely light

its only four lines, but your poem is the equivelent of the first two lines. you set something up similar to St. Vincent, but unlike her you never turn it around. most poems in this thread are essentially just
>my candle burns at both ends
>it will not last the night
which is just people using imagery to masturbate or seem pretentious. Poetry isn't about injecting the mundane with imagery, thats all style and no substance. the imagery is there to support a point.

>>12157858
its not about love. it just has love in it. there is a difference. it could be about love but you say nothing about it.

[Anonymous No.12157889]

>>12157845
>>12157858

Here is an example in my own poem. It is by no means special. but structurally (in terms of story, not in terms of say, metering) it is very strong.

the poem uses 'fire' to describe unrequited love, but to simply end it after any of the first four verses makes it just about a guy who loved a girl and then nothing happened. By adding that final note of
>it took all these scars for one man to learn
>so please let the fire... burn out
It completes the story by ending it in a different place than where it started. It's about what you learn from an experience or idea not what you simply had happen and refused to move forward with.

A more mainstream example is 'stopping in the woods on a snowy evening'. by robert frost.
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

The story is all about whether or not to stay there, essentially to let himself die as it would be more peaceful than living. but he finishes the story, making it a true poem, by having himself realize that while it is tempting, the obligation to others must outweigh that.

[Anonymous No.12157897]

You make a poem and read it aloud
You tremble quite nervously,
In front of a crowd.
You might think I’m listening
But I’m really not.
I’m actually thinking
‘Bout how my dog’s got.

How she’s been got by the worms
Who ate up all her ashes
Got by the germs,
Who excrete her as gases.
But worst of all is
She’s been got by me.
Her face is erased
From my brain’s memory.

Were her eyes black or brown?
I really can’t recall.
Feels like
I never knew
That old dog at all.

The sad fact of life
Is this happens to you.
I’ll forget all your names
Though I wish it weren’t true.
We’ll all die someday,
And pay up life’s taxes.

Get got by some worms
Who’ll eat up all our ashes.

[Anonymous No.12157911]

>>12157897
nice to read a poem with a point. im not a fan of the structure or all the imagery, but its nice to see someone who actually wants to say something and says it really well. favorite poem in this entire thread.

[Anonymous No.12158023]

>>12157864
>>12157889
Yes I suppose, it's an image of a person being in love with another, but the poem is about taking the image and putting it into words.

Okay I just read your second post, I think I'll try the poem again:

TO PONDER

As heard in the twilight, footsteps beside me in the snow

Hood over her eyes, nose fresh with the red of roses

I tapped her head gently, dusting off the snow

Frozen in the transient second, for an eternity to behold

An eternity is not enough to ponder her soul

7th floor in the fortress of sanguinary aspirations, caught again in the reverberations of love and sedation

Ruminating luminance as ink for my petty vexations, diverging thoughts fan fires for my useless creations

A transient portrait of the anachronist's sorrow, the eternal road of self castigation

Clipped wings flutter in the dark azure, a moon paler than the stars and snow

An eternity is not enough to ponder my soul

.

Okay I think that was it, thanks man, I think I understood and grasped the concepts you said and applied it nicely here.

[Anonymous No.12158057]

>>12158023
>but the poem is about taking the image and putting it into words.
it isn't about that though. it does that, but its not about that,

>the poem itsself
be careful with reddit spacing man, especially in a poem you should only be putting big spaces between stanzas. that being said this is pretty much what I was talking about though I'd hardly advise this be a final draft, especially iwth the difference in metering, and how many lines end iwth the word 'snow'.

I'd also get rid of the 'an eternity is not enough to ponder her soul' or at least switch it up. I understand that you wanted to make it a direct comparrison to the final verse with your own soul, but as its halfway through the poem it doesn't feel very cohesive... though as I typed that I could see it working if its the final line of the previous stanza (all the more reason not to use reddit spacing here)

I also feel like you go overboard not just in the length of each line but you try too hard to use complex sentence structure and the intensity of your vocabulary shoots up in the second stanza as well. There is nothing wrong with using a 'better' vocabulary, but it doesn't really match the first stanza now.
over all though yes, thats what its about, you're now making a point about the poetry.

[Anonymous No.12158102]

>>12153270
based and poetpilled

[Anonymous No.12158116]

>>12158023
punctuation is just as important in poetry. without it half your verses seem incomplete and half of them feel like they never end or connect where they shouldn't. im not talking commas in the middle, im talking periods at the end.

[Anonymous No.12158157]

>>12158057

Then it is a poem that sets a scene, but what it's about is up to the reader to decide?

I honestly don't know now, what was my first poem about anyway?

I guess I could justify first part of the poem as her writing for herself. And the second part as me writing for myself. Though really it's just hard for me to keep writing on a poem that I think ends quite nicely by itself. Thanks for the pointers man, sorry I'm neither qualified nor able to give you any feedback but I did read and enjoyed your poems and hope you do well.

TO PONDER

As heard in the twilight, footsteps beside me in the snow
Hood over her eyes, nose fresh with the red of roses
I tapped her head gently, dusting off the flakes
Frozen in the transient second, for an eternity to behold
An eternity is not enough to ponder her soul

A transient portrait of the anachronist's sorrow, the eternal road of self castigation
7th floor in the fortress of sanguinary aspirations, caught again in the reverberations of love and sedation
Ruminating luminance as ink for my petty vexations, diverging thoughts fan fires for my useless creations
Clipped wings flutter in the dark azure, a moon paler than the stars and snow
An eternity is not enough to ponder my soul

[Anonymous No.12158178]

>>12158157
>but what it's about is up to the reader to decide
thats not a thing. the closest that comes to being a thing is when someone makes an argument for two different ideas and leaves the ending in a way that both sides could be interpreted as winning out. It's an experiment in literature that suggests that neither side is right so to have a concrete ending would be a disservice to one of the sides. by letting the people decide you are saying that their preference, which often times is their MORAL preference, is what matters. There is no answer, it is your reason for having your answer that matters.

that is clearly not the case, you just tried to write a poem about something that happened and didn't really know enough about poetry to see it through. imagine if someone just wrote your first draft as a 'short story' for instance. its not a story. its an excerpt, a moment.

>what was my first poem about anyway?
you never really decided is my point. its kind of like you had the idea for a book and wrote a summary without deciding what it was really about. its a first step and nothing wrong with it, but not a poem in and of its self. its a thought.

>I guess I could justify first part of the poem as her writing for herself. And the second part as me writing for myself.
I think your second draft really speaks for its self already. It's about whether or not you can truly appreciate someone. by looking at this woman and trying to appreciate her you find that an eternity its self isn't even enough time to do that, and by extension an eternity isn't enough time to experience yourself.

>sorry I'm neither qualified nor able to give you any feedback but I did read and enjoyed your poems and hope you do well.
sure you are. I've written like 6 poems in my life. all opinions matter. sure some may be 'wrong' but you can't really know that unless someone gives an opinion and you see if it matches up with other peoples.

one persons opinion is a bias, but multiple peoples is a problem, and I appreciate any feedback or criticism you can give. I'm a bit bummed cuz i came in hoping to get help on some of my poems and spent the last few hours giving feedback to others but no one has done anything for mine.

you seriously need to use some punctuation though, particularly if you are going to use a higher end vocabulary because without it we don't know where one thought ends and another begins. that wouldn't be so bad if you were using complete sentences but you aren't, you drop a lot of basic words to make it sound more old timey poetic, which is fine but it makes it impossible to follow along without knowing where the period goes.

[Anonymous No.12158212]

>>12158178

hmmm okay so for the fire poem, at first i thought about how it was a tad too long than it needs to be. maybe one or two stanzas could be cut out and the idea of the poem would still be the same because the idea is mostly conveyed by setting a premise in the first stanza and resolving it in the last. the stanzas in the middle just helps to build that illusion of time and effort and thought you put into that relationship. but then i saw that each stanza offers its own unique valuable insight of the story. though i still feel like making it concise would help the poem more.

its 2 51 am where i live and im writing on my phone but tomorrow morning, i can critique all six of your poems if you post them all

[Anonymous No.12158219]

>>12158212
nah the only one i really want critiqued is the Renaissance man as thats being turned into a song soon, i doubt this thread will be up then anyways. good notes on the 'let it burn' poem though, I feel like both poems may have that problem. 5 act structure is too much, but when trying to fit it into 4 acts (or stanzas) i always felt like I missed a step. particularly in the renaissance man one as every stanza is about very particular moments that defined our relationship and how i admire him and what I worry about etc.

[Anonymous No.12158302]

Based on Françious poetry style

The hard heart hardly beats beats
The peering pervert peeks betwixt bus seats
The child's cleft left feets
Thems tasty n' toasty toesy treats
For the man whose sweat drips to his brow; the brow of the man in the brown jacket
Go gobblin', o' goblin, seeing child with úre peeper
Salmon, ham, and Sam and sand, sir
Egypt be gypped by da black market

[Anonymous No.12158536]

Weirdo.

For some people there seems to be,
Under specific circumstances,
A nefarious and certain possibility of loneliness
And these unlucky feel sodden with a fetid mildew
Of a harrowing milieu
That chokes vowels
And in some ways they feel castrated
Moving slowly in convoluted ovals
Pulled down by a strong heady concoction
Of senile madness at a vulnerable age

Call it personal lethargy
Or weakness and apostasy to current existence
The load remains unchanged,
Sullying folk, denying them freshness and vigour
The wallet in their pocket chock full of glib predispositions
Their mental health a brief glimpse into the
Thickly padded ball bearings of the eternal universal grind
The gulag for masters and slaves
Losers and winners
Freedom and falsity

Anyways I was

Three words left reverberating in a tiny thought transposed

From hot and prickled hands

Deep into the pickled mind of a tired man submersed
By verses subatomic
Created and inscribed inside him by caustic weather,
Infused emotion and a fraction of sleep
I know my fashion has the cold heart of a killer
Those aren't my words but your silence is damning
Anyways I was
Thick pills and oiled noses streaking viciously
Down high windows of the chalked mind
They tell him to clear himself
Or they tell him nothing
They look off or walk away
His journey unimportant or too intense
Left alone again with seemingly impervious devices
On the brink, think Alba Dover,
Rattle with me in the tense tautology of my existence
Between hysteria and function
And so I brave the naught
The engulfing zero
It was always me and always will be
I feel unsatisfying solace in the dead of night
Hands around my throat
I write my poems with my tears on gravestones in Randwick
Couldn't hear the priest come close to me
But I felt him
God knows I'm not alone
He knows I'll never find someone quite like you
Again, not my words,
But my tears soaked into the gravestone
Of someone I didn't know
This is where I left my mind in that graveyard on that morning

[Anonymous No.12158537]

>>12158536
Eyes red he searches for a momentous occasion
To make meaning of
Or a bus to have one final panic attack in
Twisted into the engine
With tonic motions before the rigor
Shouldering the locomotion in his mind he bent on home
Slipping up the stairs realizing the tautology of duality
He crawls into the bath and thinks of a God
That he has never met and has no faith in
It is a momentous occasion
To be awake once again
Away from the henchman in the mind
The unfaltering bastards belittling fragile beatitudes
He holds dear
But he only feels clear and strong and wanted
When drowning in his supple technicolour-dream-world
Cold nerves and left hand across heart is a start
In this waking life every fault is assured
Death is real and seduces his defenses
As he peels himself away from the tub
He hesitates and shakes searching for the towel
As he hits the ground with a solid feverish strength
Seeking nothing but the conclusion to the question of why
A mere mortal now a puddle in the personal pulpit
Not sleeping, not dreaming, not living
Free from the twisted diction that he could never understand

Nor express

The ennui is total
The logarithm is concluded
No more delusion, confusion, or general unkempt dysfunction
The lonesome odyssey complete
The Philosopher God King in ceasing is now crowned
Replete with infinite internal vision
Cascading away from the world.

[Anonymous No.12158547]

>>12141037

Washing Me Away From You

Together, but yet so alone,
We never sang in unison
Bound by circumstance
A child of its own

And then you did succumb,
To the swell and the breeze,
For you longed for the moment,
A moment in which you were free

A place removed from loss, and need
Where you were released from this tether
Beyond the expectations of greed
You gave yourself to the weather

One morn you did rise
Opened the door and stood at the side
All but gone before my eyes
You were cold and out of reach

No more songs left to sung
With what words I’ve yet to make
Was I too wishful to ask of what I need?
Regardless, now is my penance

On the sea of my mind you drift,
One day to wash ashore,
Until then I will sift,
These waves forevermore

[Anonymous No.12158905]

>>12157366
but the guy is left in winter after. dont end it like that. look up growth mindset vs fixed mindset and try to cultivate one in yoursrlf.

[Anonymous No.12158931]

>>12157704
means you freaked her the fuck out dude. unfortunately most liking is unreciprocated.

[Anonymous No.12158969]

>>12157897
Grade - A

well done and delightful to read.

[Anonymous No.12159022]

I shove up through the old plantation – larch
out of season, drab, drained of all greenness,
widowed princesses in moth-eaten furs –
and stumble out on the lap of the moor.
Rotten and rusted, a five-bar gate
lies felled in the mud, letting the fields escape.

Winter is late and light this year, thin snow
half puddled, sun still trapped in the earth,
sludge underfoot all the way to the ridge.

And none of the stuff that I came here to find,
except in a high nick at the valley head
where a wet, north-facing lintel of rock
has cornered and cupped enough of the wind
for running water to freeze. Icicles:

once, I un-rooted some six-foot tusk
from the waterfall's crystallised overhang,
lowered it down and stood it on end, then stared
at an ice-age locked in its glassy depths,
at far hills bottled in its weird lens.

These are brittle and timid and rare, and weep
in my gloved fist as I ferry them home.
I'd wanted to offer my daughter
a taste of the glacier, a sense of the world
being pinned in place by a diamond-like cold
at each pole. But opening up my hand
there's nothing to pass on, nothing to hold.

[Anonymous No.12159074]

In its sound you can hear its conception -
Trumpet’s lower lip temporarily unfixed
from his usual slight and tight grin,
the French Horn’s squeamish shoulders
racked back by sudden agony, or maybe
it was ecstasy - and you can hear the whole
pile of child support - a serviceman’s wage
the Trumpet sent to the Horn, dollars shipped back
from Iraq. When the valves crack you can catch the look
on the Trumpet’s face from the day the judge said
F Horn’ll make the better parent of the two,
being employed via UC, with a degree in semantics
to boot. And when it toots you can see Father
Bugle telling the Trumpet to enlist,
“dulce et decorum est” he insists.
And all that Trumpet can do is wish
he’d knocked back two more beers
and blacked out with that bastard Beiderbecke.

[Anonymous No.12159135]

>>12159074
am i missing something? i dont get it.

[Anonymous No.12159304]

They march as one, behind the drum and never plan to rest.
They do not know which way they go for that is not their quest.
A crunch, a squeal and in their zeal death is left behind.
'We've come so far, we cant turn back. Please pay that no mind!'

Cowering, a child cries, 'What are you marching for?'
'Progress, of course, you silly thing', the crowd's reply a roar.
'But for what sake? For in your wake, all that was is gone.
Except for that wretched drum, banging on and on and on.'

[Anonymous No.12160097]

>>12153012
And T.S. Eliot! Don't forget T.S. Eliot!

[Anonymous No.12160132]

>>12153009
The woods would be very silent if only the best birds sang. "Too many people" even writing poems is a good thing, even if the quality is, I should say, average.

The rhythm of the poem paces fine. Subject's runny and blah, but at least it's clear. Could use a good cutting down/

[Anonymous No.12160205]

>>12159135
Best I can gather, it's about broke brass musician and war. Otherwise it's garbled gimcrack.

[Anonymous No.12160312]

Nighttime walks in rainlight
My thought are in plain sight, awaiting their collection
I want to tie them all up
Put them in dresses and
Place them all pretty in a grand cogniscient dollhouse
With a dash of inconciveable chaos for my own dramatic and philosophical pleasure
And some sadness for my leisure

I walk when I'm on the verge
The brink of a step in a new direction
I walk on this path to contemplate the paths I will take
I will often face, advance toward my fate

My shins hurt
But my sins birth new panoramas
Perspectives importance
And new destinations
I want to make terrible desicions
So I can experience living with imperfections
And so I can filter those imperfections
Through a lens of introspection
And achieve the purity in perfect stepping

So still I walk
Sometimes I walk towards the fertile
Sometimes I walk in a circle
Sometimes I walk towards a place that is nothing at all
Till my troubles are something to call toward for STRENGTH
And even when still in the length of my trek
I'm still on my quest
Till I find my peace on distress

[Anonymous No.12160590]

>>12152965

Best one here. FUCK words.

[Anonymous No.12161160]

>>12157911
>>12158969
Thanks for the feedback. I usually stay away from poetry but I figured I'd try my hand at it.

[Anonymous No.12161295]

>>12161160
its not poetry. its prose.

[Anonymous No.12161781]

>>12161295
Nice bait, but I'm not taking it.

[Anonymous No.12161848]

>>12161781
im not joking. justify to me why its poetry.

[Anonymous No.12161861]

>>12161781
nvm wrong guy by accident. yeah was a great poem.

[Anonymous No.12161875]

>>12159022
now this is a poem. beautiful - A+. show the rest of /lit/ how to do it bro.

[Anonymous No.12161897]

>>12160097
why did he ruin poetry young boy?

[Anonymous No.12161908]

>>12160312
get a career as a songwriter f****t.

[Anonymous No.12161948]

>>12142256
dont pat attention to the brainlet, his jargon provides the air of being an intellectual without him having to actually be one, which is why he adopted it in the first place. He obviously has a lot of your self-worth wrapped up in that persona. Ultimately, he overuse of cliches simply betrays a tendency toward pseudo-intellectualism.

I wont tell you it's beyond criticism, it certainly can be improved, but the core idea is really great, I enjoyed it.

[Anonymous No.12162079]

>>12158219
To be honest, if its a song, i wont particularly care about its lyrics. I would be rather fond of a song that repeats a line or two in every stanza.

The only thing i would really change is the last line

from

i didn't want you to leave

to

i dont want you to leave

[Anonymous No.12162147]

>>12162079
Tense is important to the actual story. I wrote the poem well after that tangled web that i weaved. It's important to know in the end that the renaissance man did leave, at least to me it is.

[Anonymous No.12162178]

>>12159022
by far the best poem ive seen on 4chan.

[Anonymous No.12162198]

>>12159022
beautiful lad.

[Anonymous No.12162206]

Every Night

I lay drunk and I listen
to the shellfish scuttling
across my eyes.
Visions of a new humanity are
drawn in dribble with the
uninformed fingers of pissed-off Fandango dancers.
Belligerent, adulterated happiness
comes through my brain in sniping beats and whinnies
shooting holes in
tin-boat dreams drowning in drought
brought about when a Hosanna Superstar left town for the night
eager to escape the twin-faces that perturb and beat down Truth.

In my minds eye
there is a woman raped and pillaged of her youth
then stoned
she floats like smoke
crumbling through the mirrored city
slitting her throat.

As the beads of her life drum the pavement into a rife
booming rhythm that makes snails
slide under tires
cracking like little-thunder
others shake drenched in God’s sweat
the shiny monochrome rivers oozing frightfully thick
making girls in stilettos stick or trip
on the nature-bombed concrete
that sleeps a man-made death
under the refurbished robotics of Dr. TJ Eckleburg
the eyes now updated technological monoliths
lasers in the night
that have been draped on the world
like a curtain made from a red dress.

The eyes of New World Order
hover above like dark metallic angels
singing a silent song that sounds like mental anguish.

True rainmen huddle away from modernity
because the united state of the song is loud and tearing in their brilliant minds
whilst fanciful men hold reign with practiced subjugation
using cameras to make and break.
Sentinels sit with gleaming slits
they are are perched on the knife edges of buildings
never closing their buzzing vision,
all our failures,
and our revoltingly docile
“Everything is alright, yes”
is a good use of suffocating irony -
just read a damn book.
You burst forth, speaking in my mind like a ghost:
“I watched the movie.”
I see no flicker in your eyes
reflecting my own:
has the green light died?

The scuttling falls away into the dark night
I try to rest my case among remnants of Atlantis
in a swimming pool filled with broken hopes and dreams
a shattered mirror now reflects the moon
but I lack the means to perform such a feat.

“Kill the body and the head will die”

Not in this situation, good Judas.
Not again,
good Judas.

I look up,
opening my chest that cracks and groans
letting the night feast on my twisted organs
in the shimmering dark

[Anonymous No.12162212]

Burning thumbs on cigarettes
in a tight cell full of mirrors.
Screaming to the heavens like a priest with tourettes.
I just wanna let you know that so many times I have dreamt of letting you go,
but your words hang like lead metaphors in my soul
and the nightmare arises as a foul and deceitful horror on the horizon,
and that’s got me warring desperately against your wailing soul as it is pulled from death.
Desiring me, calling me, commanding me,
you’ll never let me go you say,

That’s what you say,

that’s what you say,

that’s what you say…

With your charcoal eyes and Monroe hips,
perfectly displayed in these painfully old pictures,
with your messages inscribed on the back,
devilish desires tattooed without tact,
you have buried your ink deep into my skin, your soul has become a part of me and so I can still find you deep within – and I can’t free myself from you,
that is my sin, as you are calling me, begging me,
drawing me into your poor fabric, tattered with lethargy,
dragging me deep into harmful empathy,
you’re always there late at night, just out of sight, beside my bed
still cold and calling,

Incessantly,

And you are the most beautiful suicide,
And you are like a samurai facing machine guns,
And you are brilliant in the setting sun
And you are sure my words batter the ceiling like moths to a flame, rolling back and forth eternally like pebbles on the cold and restless shore, but as long as you listen I’ll keep instigating these desires forevermore.

But you’re not listening anymore,
you’re just watching me crawl
and I could almost forget your name,
I could almost forget what I found myself for
if these similes would just stop making sense.

[Anonymous No.12162217]

I get fucking fired up when these realisations hit me,
causing me to sit lonely, violently,
deliriously drenched in steaming sweat,
because my desires for you just won’t expire.
No matter how long I leave them burning on this funeral pyre.
Words keep flooding my mind,
tidal waves of thought fighting my man kind
and what it means to be kind
has got me questioning your motives too brutally outlined in your face that still writhes frantically in my memory like worms in a rich and rotten cemetery.
And you’re devouring the very lives that fought the very misery,
that now invades my thought, internally, eternally,
and when you look at me,
darling,
I am suffering from emotional dysentery,
and many wouldn’t notice this externally,
but you seem to have known me better than my own family, or perhaps you were just lucky, because you are the Paris to my Achilles.
Heal is what I need to do
but because of you
I’m thinking through this maze of forlorn produce,
this compost heap of subversive devil juice,
if I could just produce some weapon powerful against you,
my angst wouldn’t be so bemused
by the bastard handcuffs that hold me to you,
like graverobbers who fall in love with the dug-up-deceased,
wise men say that I should let sleeping dogs lie -
but my memory keeps you alive, and you’re always barking temptations into my mind late at night.

Keep sipping on your pardoning justifications and I’ll keep tearing up my love-drenched letters.

But not this letter, not this time, next time think
before you send me to the brink,
ice melts in the summer but your vices never consider
that seasons may not change where the Moon and Sun do not range
across the landscape of true devotion -
like weather that doesn’t care for your insurance complex -
hail comes down hard whether or not cars are parked seductively outside your door.

You fucking whore.

This is the valentines that you will never receive unless of course I slip this knife into my sleeve and slice the postman on the thirteenth,
the fucking eve of the romantic monstrosity
that holds society for a few hours as desperate lovers pen letters to each other
afraid that their lust will die undiscovered,
but this has finally come full circle and I thank god for the return to sender,
Whilst I watch embers burn these words into darkness, as the flames gnaw and groan against the same fucking eyes that sent messages into your brain,
my witness to your uncouthness grows full strength bellowing and blowing away your likeness – it was in these twilight hours when you used to bear witness to the fucking devotions that now seem to fall weightless against your breast, breathless.

[Anonymous No.12162218]

Never again will I lash out romantically,
drowning you in nonsense that defies eternity,
Never again will you fly against my reasons repeatedly,
I’ll be here forever and now you’re not even a memory.
Never again will I share my heart distractedly,
I’d like to believe that there are too many beautiful people to deny permanently,

So this is good bye my sweet valentine,
this is my valedictory,
And darling,

I have graduated from your school of madness with full marks,
my doctorate is written in dark scars on my fleshy heart.

And my thesis you would have just read
if it weren’t for the sad fact that you’re dead.

So rest in pieces,
my darling,
my undesired desire,
my vitriolic valentine,

Rest.

In.

Pieces.

[Anonymous No.12162223]

The ancient fires returned with mystic timing,
Some blazed and raced over the land,
Some lazed around dazed plants intertwining hot licks with green, brown, Red,
Furry, feathered, shelled and scaled wicks.
Everything a wick,
Everything alive became alight.
Like clockwork the fires danced together,
& became mystery,
& became new life.
This humble fire, healthy and noble,
Sat upon the land,
Recycling soil and stars.

[Anonymous No.12162231]

I take off my watch as the children call for guides to tell the time.
But I have not ever,
not ever,
not ever felt the fucking feeling akin to spreading freedom.
Children constantly remind me of the potentiality
that I hate to imagine superseding myself….

Hanging feelings,
rolling like ghouls in the darkness,
are pushed back because
there is one man that tells me through an absence of acknowledgement
that I need to keep moving into the dark chapels.

But he keeps talking loudly and pointing to the darkened pictures,
and when he does this
he utters in a snake-whisper that I am a part of the coloured squares,
as if nobody else is allowed to hear this moment.

He keeps showing me through the cigars that he smokes
that I need to keep searching for a place to show my lapels.
He shows me that there is a treasure hidden away;
he draws diagrams in the air with smoke blown from his mushy-lungs…

I think that I am just another passer-by.
Another one doomed to the lake of fire.
But he knows I am from an old time,
a time when wars and sacrifices actually meant something.
But he has distorted it as if I must hail to Primes that call me to fuck wined-up.
I must fuck the Primes that now place in front of me the absence of my lifetime.

Prime-ministers denote exactly what my society takes upon them at this time.
But when He tells me to stop and to be steady
and to watch the picture above the chapel
I wonder if what I am here for is just another foil,
because, all in all, we have to watch our own backs or we shall fall.
Or, even worse, maybe I am just his character used and abused like a little pawn;
a little porn here and there never hurt anybody right?

Perhaps I am only here to lark like a coloured bird
amidst the fake frolicking people that cannot seem to discern
between the chairs and the tables.

They keep placing their faith on the fools as I am sitting on stools
and bearing my soul through my enabling of the true sacred.
Day dreams always lure me away from reality,
and He knows this as
He screams from the entrance
That I am not becoming faith. Hence
he leads me out of the shrine now
where I must do my time,
how…
I do not know.
But he leads me on through sand and snow,
constantly pulling my lips into sentences
and twisting them into dairy-coloured fables
that were never meant to see the light of day

I pray,
I pay.

Paying for goods that are not mine.
I am stepping in between each stony thorn that rises constantly
seeking some sort of ridiculous ingenuity,
here thorns could be crosses or corsets or crowns.

[Anonymous No.12162235]

>>12162231
I am not the person to start naming names, or naming towns.
Cities scare me tearing Heavens with sky scrapers and
I am just the bearer of this time and this departure…
I truly have no land, no place for storm to strike, no pasture.

I have no mother, I have no daughter, no son and no father.

Yet He still screams from the entrance of my mind
raiding my life with his verbal cosmic ether…
Except this time it is different,
I know this as my hands rise and clasp around throat,
blood booming like thunder.
Flesh on flesh,
tightening like vices on wretches;
children killing children in Brooklyn.
These muscles understand the fallacy
of the broken generation.
Hunter became
hunted…

Lights abound like violent sounds whilst feather-souls drop
and loop around me forming ivory-scaffolding
where my old yellow bones once shook and trembled in fuming indignation.
I never knew death would feel this good.

This is truly right and so I proceed historically,
augmented in proper faith, I walk through my life where I see
soft, sullen faces exploding in the background of my old home.
Mother is playing Vera and the colours of the wall shine through
the house, constantly crawling between her awful womb and my throne;
like some crazy diamond unleashed through my muse, it kills true.

I burn like a molten sun into the most magnificent sunset
but I am not fulfilled…
still misunderstood,
still on fire.

I still do not understand the pleasures that He pushed into my eyes
when he cussed and darkened the lids that held my world between two fleshy cups.

He figured that eternity would right his wrongs…
completely missing the point when he drew his sword and struck the wooden stock from the wall
as the world crumbled down around me like Rome from pages wronged
I mopped the blood from the ancient towns and I denied the sins.

And He still,
still misunderstood that

eternity…

eternity would

right…

right his

wrongs…

So…

So In darkness I shed my painful ailments
learning a sight that only comes from tears and the tearing of ridiculous dreams.
I released the anguish of my soul and the semipermanent stain of ignorant yolk,
because I finally understood the universe is big enough to hold the sin of mankind and myself.

[Anonymous No.12162241]

>>12162235
Somehow someone will keep sucking and
pushing blood down into the womb of the world.
Denying the existence of the center with words preached from
healthy blood caked bodies.

Losing sight gave me the chance to realize truth and so I see it all, everything.
They now gaze upon my looming figure,
noticing the truth in my sunken sockets and so they bow.

I am growing true upon this sin-touched yet truth-burnt hearth,
I feel it in the minds of the masses and muses…

The same hearth that held my death,
has now become the rock of my re-birth.

It is from this place,
that I shall rule the Earth.

[Anonymous No.12162268]

>>12162235
>>12162231
>>12162223
>>12162218
>>12162217
>>12162212
>>12162206

shit.

[Anonymous No.12162279]

>>12162268
and i can tell most of it is 1 person.

[Anonymous No.12162292]

>>12159022
love it

[Anonymous No.12162327]

>>12162279
>>12162268
Just a reminder that this isn't about judging poetry, poetry is subjective.

[Anonymous No.12162336]

>>12162327
t. idiot you decided to post his worthless shit

[Anonymous No.12162338]

>>12162336
You're obviously moved by it. I wonder why that is. What does your anger hide? You seem green.

[Anonymous No.12162343]

>>12162336
>>12162279
>>12162268
"Don't criticize what you can't understand"

[Anonymous No.12162344]

>>12159022
publish it.

[Anonymous No.12162345]

>>12162338
So you're taking the detached psychological observer approach? I must say, while it has been done to death maybe you can add some nuance to it. My "anger", as you have so astutely pointed at, doesn't even hide but blatantly declares my intense hatred for you.

[Anonymous No.12162353]

>>12162343
>>12162327
this thread is about criticising poetry not comments so shut your fucking mouth or give a review.

[Anonymous No.12162359]

>>12162345
I'm just wondering why you're so detached from reality and full of anger. You seem very minute.

>>12162353
Still delusional I see.

[Anonymous No.12162371]

And with shaky legs
virgin arms
and eyesight glued to the sky
friend empties blank pad
heavy pen
and deep as ocean book
into the not so shallow eye of my mind

my arms
hands
fingers
not so virgin of now
of anymore
and of odyssey
beginning
the place where blank moments
become engulfing year long nightmares
of absence
and suicide
longing and crippling shaking

this warbling room of nervousness
a bay more busy than a mall
we are here

no longer tourists in a diverse atmosphere
trapped in a smoking room
the hook
formed deliriously around your mind’s lyrical mandible

walk

with me now

through a smoke storm
of personal second hand sexual misery
illuminated by my questioning eyes
here
hot
hidden
virgin
probing
fingers
and it figures
and it figures the figure out

and we are here

and I am impersonal
you are a good poem
a bad person
coming to me in between strange styles
this short
tepid
memory
how weak are we
I the person
you the poem
the poet,
there:

[Anonymous No.12162372]

>>12162359
Again with this nonsense. I think maybe - if you'll let me play the armchair shrink for a minute - you yourself are particularly angry, yet are so mired in passivity that you cloak said anger with these observations about how minute I must be to be filled with hatred over some text on my computer.

[Anonymous No.12162373]

>>12162371
Blinking in the stark light of reality
burning
illuminating
pulsing against the shadow gurgling within morose victim-filled mind sewers
that weakly drain away vigorous thinking
and the deformed dormant difficult dance of impermanent power.

And I know your power
and I know your flavour
sentimental boats in a tiny beach
where people lay around on lit rocks
swimming in perfectly clear water
and people have died here
on this spot
in this place
this textured power
this flavour
like a song you lay there
awaiting the awful poking collapse
of my falling
empty pen
and you turn and watch my flicking
non-sleeping arm
and await the date when you can confirm with me
this disability
of my soul
deep conscience tormented
how could it not be
nightmares fermented in the soulful glimpses of paradox and reality and the coldest soberest mornings still hit like a drug
and twist the brain inside the skull
and roll the eyes and dot the tees
with nosebleeds and cum.

You can look at me like a map
of consuming despair
I am there
and you are here.
And you are He.
And me.
In such a long song,
the biggest ever!
Taller than the tallest drunk!
And he,
on the brink, and he has no answer why,
why is he on the brink,
and he is so tall.

You turn to me,
you are always turning to me,
and you answer,
softly,
as if you do not care:

[Anonymous No.12162376]

>>12162359
what per se did i say that was deluded. show me your poem. thats the only way ill judge u. coz im not a pedantic cunt.

[Anonymous No.12162377]

>>12162373
“except for perhaps,
the shaking shins,
quivering knuckles,
and the gyre gut of a thousand unborn miracles,
here I spill it,
drawing us together,
like two puddles coming connected,
colourful, petrol born,
nuances of portayal,
I am drawn,
and you are free,
still so virgin,
you evade me,
and the moments,
how,
how do you dance between the embers,
you are so frozen in my mind each night,
do you consume the fire,
do you delight in the pyre,
do you re-create me when I am done and dusted?
Do you birth me in your bright morning?”

And he fell.

“I do,
I try,
I do in the dark of night,
distinct mother poets embrace him,
falling child,
I do,
twice, and twice more,
twice,
and twice more.”

There was a soft splash.

And she turned again and said,
softly,
as if she did not care:

“However,
do not forget eternity
scrawled with dignity on sin denying streets
of healthy homeless
of cancerous business folk
and within the twang of middle class hero
singing out of tune to the coming night
the tune when so many politicians write wrongly
nullifying the potential to right the wrongs
(look at you, clairvoyant, prophet, critic)
a society lays dormant
door mat for the ill composed
watch as the friars freak on ghost smoke
laying like seduction on window sills
swollen with dripped ink
from a nervous, shaking pen,
that was meant to be re-writing the walls
and giving birth to new roads
someone’s guilt
fills the ill commissioned cells
and the last one now
throttles the first…
Here I have been quaking
forever to just tell you
I love you
with the selfless jazz heart
of red wine titanic
melting the cold shipwrecks
of yesteryear
re-birthing faded parades
in glorious hues of saturn
galactic sundown
every evening
and chosen to show
the diverse beauty of a single moment
one note
in tune
echoes out over city over memphis
and it is my love for you
over lone-grass evaporation and cloud-building escalation,
and loving the strong sense of purpose,
it is my love for you,
the place of memory and fate
where we remember tomorrow
and our objectives,
desires,
conspiracies of love,
the creative moment,
dreams of heaven above,
and here we are at last,
so very potent,
unlocked,

[Anonymous No.12162381]

>>12162377
and more than brass,
we human beings,
we lucky few,
settle our limbs,
comfort the weary,
with pens empty of ink,
sing old songs,
sing new songs,
sing.”

And there we sat
among the many
as the body floated by
and children screamed
but it was impossible to tell
if they were happy
or if they were
sad.

[Anonymous No.12162384]

>>12162376
>>12162372
>>12162353
>>12162345
Hey fags it doesn't take a psychologist to realize you're over-reacting.

[Anonymous No.12162390]

>>12162384
Hey fag it doesn't take a fag to realize you are a shitty excuse for a man

[Anonymous No.12162395]

>>12162371
>>12162373
shit

[Anonymous No.12162400]

Mrs. Manhattan
furled in satin,
ornate in flesh
cold in flesh
red red red red
in the parlor on 48th;
vampira

[Anonymous No.12162407]

>>12162381
>>12162377
just stop.

>>12162384
are you sure youre not overreacting?.. partly from your shite poetry polluting a decent thread. now gtfo.

[Anonymous No.12162410]

>>12162390
>>12162395
>>12162407

You are no better than what you think you are so nobly railing against. How are you this blind? Take a walk.

[Anonymous No.12162416]

>>12159022
great poem buddy.

[Anonymous No.12162422]

>>12162410
what am i railing against except some asshole?

[Anonymous No.12162423]

>>12159022
woah ice melts

[Anonymous No.12162425]

>>12162410
How about I take a walk to your shitty apartment and piss on the doormat your cunt sister gave you two years ago

[Anonymous No.12162431]

>>12162410
youre a shit poet go home.

[Anonymous No.12162432]

>>12162422
Hey princess, fuck off back to l eddit.

[Anonymous No.12162436]

>>12162431
>>12162425
>>12162422
>>12162407
>>12162395
>>12162390
Mods? What the fuck is going on here. Calm down and stop being obnoxious. Are you adults or are you toddlers?

[Anonymous No.12162438]

Retards.


POET Simon Armitage has won the prestigious Keats-Shelley Prize 2010.

His winning poem, The Present, was inspired by the winter of 2008/09 when his daughter wasn't very well.

Simon went up on the moor near his Huddersfield home in search of icicles to cheer her up - sadly he came back empty handed.

All of the poems entered for the pounds 1,000 prize were judged without a name, and Simon is the highest profile poet to have won it so far.

The prize was established to encourage talented poets and essayists of all ages and walks of life to write on romantic themes - poems of modern relevance and romantic inspiration, and essays on Keats, Shelley, Byron or Mary Shelley.

Simon, of Marsden, said: "I'm not sure if it's possible to be a romantic poet anymore, but more and more poets seem to be turning their eye towards nature. To the necessity of its otherness. "It's hard to explain, but speaking personally, if the birds and the moors and the trees and the ice disappeared, then I would have no interest in writing about a city street, and probably no purpose as a poet."

[Anonymous No.12162439]

>>12162423
woah better poem than youll ever make.

[Anonymous No.12162445]

>>12162436
We're toddlers pretending to be adults, so how about you join in on the fun you seedy bastard

[Anonymous No.12162446]

>>12162439
t. simon armitage
fuck off back to l eddit

[Anonymous No.12162450]

>>12162445
yeah nah you're a dumb cunt.

[Anonymous No.12162456]

>>12162438
i bet you were that kid in 4th grade that everyone thought was a cunt.

[Anonymous No.12162457]

>>12162450
Absolutely, but it beats whatever boring dribble you amuse yourself with

[Anonymous No.12162463]

There are a billion broken rooftops
with groaning eaves
chock full of gumtrees
with weird leaves the
colour of milo

and it is full moon
Thursday night
when i am having
my low

walking like a stranger,
no,
walking like a poem
through a ward of
whimsical deaf people
with rhetorical hands
and my fingers are in my ears
as my tears
dance down my cheeks

I am London
I am France

I am Paris

and I am the best at hating myself.

I am Otis going down
I said I am France, is Cobain growing up?
Nevermind… I am human and inhumane.
Gas to the flame;
I am queer,
shoulder hunched,
willing or wishing to be wheeled,
weaving, too buggered to heal,
cracked and dry,
I am a one man desert
boxing dancing tears from my sights.
I am online,
I am broken,
sinking,
with milo comes mess,
leaves children evidence,
I am remembrance,
when I am weaving
i am Hugo,
great bells heaving.

I sit with my low.

Slowly,
I am breathing.

[Anonymous No.12162483]

>>12162436
atleast it took longer and produced more replies than when that dickhead put an emily dickinson poem here and no one gave two shits even though shes a more famous poet.

maybe coz shes a woman. tbf they are shit at poetry.

[Anonymous No.12162486]

Hiding emberred butts – under
tiny boulders,
accidentally burning beetles.

Escaping on fresh tires
and drinking from wine bottles – whispered
to overflow: soft-gut song of freedom.

Bleeding from broken beetles – trapped
inside the carcass,
that rode on fresh tires.

Hiding in the emberred nothingness
of that moment.
Life emptying out in whispers:
Blood drunk in the night

[Anonymous No.12162488]

>>12162483
Well what kind of poems do you find pleasing?
I am so staunchly picky, it's aggravating.

[Anonymous No.12162490]

never asking questions
only answers
as polite as possible
as not to offend anyone
anyone is only me
i'm less than nothing
not worth a single emotion
peripheral vision
not even nuisance
if she is human, i am not
if i am, i'm not in her dimension.
crushing really
new beginnings my friend, new beginnings

[Anonymous No.12162494]

>>12162490
>another poem from an introvert with woman troubles

[Anonymous No.12162497]

>>12159022
fantastic poem.

[Anonymous No.12162501]

>>12162445
good on you.

[Anonymous No.12162505]

>>12162501
It's pretty nice. Takes my mind off the fact that I'm sitting here arguing with strangers

[Anonymous No.12162508]

>>12162268
I normaly dont concur with insuferable, minimalist fags like this, but having read only the first one, I gotta say we are of the same mind about the quality of your work.

[Anonymous No.12162509]

Boult to Marina
Only a part of me shall triumph in this
(I am not Pericles)
Though I have your silken eyes to kiss
And maiden-knees
Part of me remains, wench, Boult-upright
The rest of me drops off into the night.

What would you have me do? Go to the wars?
There’s damned deceit
In these wounds, thrusts, shell-holes, of the cause
And I’m no cheat.
So blowing this lily as trumpet with my lips
I assert my original glory in the dark eclipse.

Sainted and schismatic would you be?
Four frowning bedposts
Will be the cliffs of your wind-thrummelled sea
Lady of these coasts,
Blown lily, surplice and stole of Mytilene,
You shall rest snug to-night and know what I mean.

[Anonymous No.12162514]

>>12162508
yes im gay well done asshole.

[Anonymous No.12162515]

Innumerable the images
The register of birth and dying
Under the carved rococo porch
The Tigris — Venice — Melbourne — The Ch’en Plain —
And the sound track like a trail of saliva.
Dürer: “Samson killing the Lion” 1498
Thumbs twisting the great snarl of the beast’s mouth
Tail thrashing the air of disturbed swallows
That fly to the castle on the abraded hill
London:
Samson that great city, his anatomy on fire
Grasping with gnarled hands at the mad wasps
Yet while his bearded rage survives contriving
An entelechy of clouds and trumpets.
There have been interpolations, false syndromes
Like a rivet through the hand
Such deliberate suppressions of crisis as
Footscray:
The slant sun now descending
Upon the montage of the desecrate womb
Opened like a drain.
The young men aspire
Like departing souls from leaking roofs
And fractured imploring windows to
(All must be synchronized, the jagged
Quartz of vision with the asphalt of human speech)
Java:
The elephant motifs contorted on admonitory walls,
The subtle nagas that raise the cobra hood
And hiss in the white masterful face.
What are these mirk channels of the flesh
That now sweep me from
The blood-dripping hirsute maw of night’s other temple
Down through the helpless row of bonzes
Till peace suddenly comes:
Adonai:
The solemn symphony of angels lighting
My steps with music, o consolations!
Palms!
O far shore, target and shield that I now
Desire beyond these terrestrial commitments.

[Anonymous No.12162516]

Culture as Exhibit
“Swamps, marshes, borrow-pits and other
Areas of stagnant water serve
As breeding-grounds ...” Now
Have I found you, my Anopheles!
(There is a meaning for the circumspect)
Come, we will dance sedate quadrilles,
A pallid polka or a yelping shimmy
Over these sunken sodden breeding-grounds!
We will be wraiths and wreaths of tissue-paper
To clog the Town Council in their plans.
Culture forsooth! Albert, get my gun.

I have been noted in the reading-rooms
As a borer of calf-bound volumes
Full of scandals at the Court. (Milord
Had his hand upon that snowy globe
Milady Lucy’s sinister breast . . .) Attendants
Have peered me over while I chewed
Back-numbers of Florentine gazettes
(Knowst not, my Lucia, that he
Who has caparisoned a nun dies
With his twankydillo at the ready? . . .)
But in all of this I got no culture till
I read a little pamphlet on my thighs
Entitled: “Friction as a Social Process.”
What?
Look, my Anopheles,
See how the floor of Heav’n is thick
Inlaid with patines of etcetera . . .
Sting them, sting them, my Anopheles.

[Anonymous No.12162517]

Colloquy with John Keats


“And the Lord destroyeth the imagination of all them
that had not the truth with them.” (Odes of Solomon 24.8.)

I have been bitter with you, my brother,
Remembering that saying of Lenin when the shadow
Was already on his face: “The emotions are not skilled workers.”
Yet we are as the double almond concealed in one shell.
I have mistrusted your apodictic strength
Saying always: Yet why did you not finish Hyperion?
But now I have learned not to curtail
What was in you the valency of speech
The bond of molecular utterance.

I have arranged the interstellar zodiac
With flowers on the Goat’s horn, and curious
Markings on the back of the Crab. I have lain
With the Lion, not with the Virgin, and become
He that discovers meanings.

Now in your honour Keats, I spin
The loaded Zodiac with my left hand
As the man at the fair revolves
His coloured deceitful board. Together
We lean over that whirl of
Beasts flowers images and men
Until it stops . . . Look! my number is up!
Like you I sought at first for Beauty
And then, in disgust, returned
As did you to the locus of sensation
And not till then did my voice build crenellated towers
Of an enteric substance in the air.
Then first I learned to speak clear; then through my turrets
Pealed that Great Bourdon which men have ignored.

Coda

We have lived as ectoplasm
The hand that would clutch
Our substance finds that his rude touch
Runs through him a frightful spasm
And hurls him back against the opposite wall.

[Anonymous No.12162519]

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

[Anonymous No.12162520]

And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?

What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

[Anonymous No.12162525]

>>12162488
i like ted hughes.

[Anonymous No.12162529]

>>12162525
Poetry is like cats.

[Anonymous No.12162533]

is this one guy spamming all his work coz if so this kind of posting puts me off reading. it looks like same guy.

[Anonymous No.12162536]

>>12162520
stop spamming your shit cunt

[Anonymous No.12162539]

>>12162520
Now you're just straight ripping off TS Eliot. good taste but it doesn't save you from being a miserable dumbass

[Anonymous No.12162540]

>>12162529
need less faggots like you on this board.

[Anonymous No.12162543]

Tfw poetry is so good it makes talentless manbabies go nuclear mad.

[Anonymous No.12162570]

>>12162543
exactly

I shove up through the old plantation – larch
out of season, drab, drained of all greenness,
widowed princesses in moth-eaten furs –
and stumble out on the lap of the moor.
Rotten and rusted, a five-bar gate
lies felled in the mud, letting the fields escape.

Winter is late and light this year, thin snow
half puddled, sun still trapped in the earth,
sludge underfoot all the way to the ridge.

And none of the stuff that I came here to find,
except in a high nick at the valley head
where a wet, north-facing lintel of rock
has cornered and cupped enough of the wind
for running water to freeze. Icicles:

once, I un-rooted some six-foot tusk
from the waterfall's crystacrystallised overhang,
lowered it down and stood it on end, then stared
at an ice-age locked in its glassy depths,
at far hills bottled in its weird lens..

These are brittle and timid and rare, and weep
in my gloved fist as I ferry them home.
I'd wanted to offer my daughter
a taste of the glacier, a sense of the world
being pinned in place by a diamond-like cold
at each pole. But opening up my hand
there's nothing to pass on, nothing to hold.

[Anonymous No.12162596]

>>12162570
>>12162497
>>12162344
>>12162292
>>12162198
>>12162178
>>12161875
?

[Anonymous No.12162629]

>>12162596
Same guy, but is clever enough to wait in between posts so as to avoid detection.

[Anonymous No.12162662]

Why died I not from the womb?
Learnet to live a life without learning
O tiger footed rage, you embosom me
Nauseous mind, you purge healthy hunches
Thes unwitty hand halt die knife from krying
And made her a gift of my swan song guffaw

English is not my first language, and this is not orginal, nor copied, just translated

[Anonymous No.12162694]

>>12162494
huh, guess you are right. i write only for myself. that isn't art if i don't aspire to make it art so that others can like it. thank you. and i mean that.

[Anonymous No.12162709]

The Noblest Roman

And the elements so mix'd in him
That Nature might shun his Janus-faces,
His resolve which wills and effaces
Even the loftiest of men
Into mangled, lifeless corpses
Mere playthings for the outpour
Surging and burning
Excrucior
Time-weary tyrant, plaguing our present
Who signifies decline but such monsters
An era's closing, dusk of an ideal,
And smashed like Tuscan urns
He in whom his other half contrives,
Conspires 'gainst him daily
Wages but one in war with Nature
Each second an axis upon which Time grinds
Into dust once proud Titans
A throw of dice
Chance-stricken inertia
Speak hands for me now, Noble one

[Anonymous No.12162852]

>>12141037

Summer Night

The trees here have grown, but the towers, they stayed the same.
Warm humid breeze, as heard in the cicadas, footsteps beside me in the dark.
Pale yellow lights, voices and rustles of the blue ragged dreamers, pitched with personas of char.
High castles and dresses, vests smokes cigarettes, ice cold bars.
One for me and one for her.

The same streets runs cold, warm with the people that never left.
Night truck comes and fountain hoses, gentle sounds from tall window, there are cars.
The same old plates, served with warm, unfamiliar gazes.
Close your eyes, does it taste like you have been here before?

No longer a boy in the back of a bicycle, no longer belonging, on streets, riding, a vagabond.
The handle bar is wet with the travellers' greases.
The talisman shines with gold of foreign made thesis.
Empty road i ride on, lost souls in sight, they melts into the back of my picture frame, the heirs of the same foot.

Empty towers in a clear summer's night; pale azure flutters for the clipped horns fold.
On thrones they shine their fires and gold; gone and perished, the estrangement of my dear and beloved world.

Why must the trees grow? like the towers they should stay the same
Why must the streets go? like the city they should be named the same

this street
shang-hai

[Anonymous No.12162923]

My life has woven me eccentrically,
With its dreariness and its sympathy
I am the evil and I am the good strangely
But my evil harms no dear, and the good in me
Is unconditionally priceless and cannot but be
The smile on the face of the other I like to see
I hate to forgiveness and I love to tears and Thee
Comprehend not what’s for is this honesty
I am the only Me and no other creature but me
That I resemble what life has long knitted passionately
Is the bliss that renders every flash back every memory
Every pain, chagrin and every ecstasy an endless story
Of an outspoken lady who reminds you of Kafka’s crazy
Metamorphosis, of Woolf’s helpless moth ridiculously
Of Soueif’s Aisha in her identity, and this is but me
I am the Arab that I am not though in me it is the harmony
And I am the one who stands on the threshold to observe closely
Life weaving me with its defeat and its glory.

[Anonymous No.12163129]

>>12162709
Once a pice complex, once one simple
Like a Tornade, like rock and a water
A constant in a series of transformations
A dissipative structure, not named then
Nature, indeed, Nature, lights oneless face
Sign, wave, gesticulation, that are his
Tall and noble and contemptuous men
To short, to base, to humble made into
Poor puppets at acting alive, poor men
At acting dead; Twist and turn, burn
And burst. Troubled beyond tumuls
From feasting years, snatch by a scourge
Believed now to be the sickle carry Time
War wages and Nature pays the wage

I rewrote it, I don't know why, what do you think?

[Anonymous No.12163226]

>>12162852
Sapling swelled, towers tarried
Breze warm and humid trailed
Sick man made small suns alof
Castles dressed in smogen vests
I have what she has, alike amount
Streets shake like grey God´s acre
And truck and fountains and cars
Hurling, dripling, vrrrooomlings
Same plate, same snug, same ster
Eyes shut, how does dear taste?
Nurtured by dreamscape nostalgia
The bar butt lubed by ligrim hands
The periapt dawns otherworldly
Soulless roads ghosting in sight
Warp and curve, forever escaping
Trees and streets both grow and go
This womb of dearest memories
That sure corner, that buoyant bush
This mine Eden, that never cast off
This street, this Shanghai, sublet.

[Anonymous No.12163806]

>>12163226

Some parts wasn't the same as what I originally wrote. But I reallllly like it, I meant cigarette smoke literally but it being smog can also work. This gives me the same chills, seeing the old familiar streets after 8 years and seeing them getting rebuilt into something new and foreign. But the city (name) never changes.

[Anonymous No.12163951]

>>12163129
Absolute shit. You completely missed the point. Nice going, retard