Untitled - comments appreciated

[DamagedLemon]

Dry lips, spinning mind
Mood-thrashing thoughts
It looks beautiful on the outside
Pretty and pale
Like a best friend

Better still when it vanishes
Into me, through and through
Thoughts drift out the window-
Might it have been another opening?
Under a door, perhaps?
I don’t know for sure
All I know is it doesn’t matter anymore

Not for now
Now I lie very still and let it overtake me
Me and my nothingness
Washed away like sin

 

[Mehm]

very smooth and beautiful

It is also very vague, I have no idea what you are talking about :D I'm not sure if this is intentional or not.

 

[DamagedLemon]

Thank you.

It's about Heroin Was trying to make it as vague as possible so it could be related to anything.

 

[TheDeceased]

I like the first half of it, but I think it loses it towards the end when you start asking questions. I think the questions detract noticeably from the piece. 'Might it have been' and 'perhaps' bother me. They sound a bit pretentious or something, definitely out of place, anyway. The second break also seems a little forced - the first line of your third stanza is a direct continuation of the last line of the second. It seems like you only put the break in there to visually balance out the words.

Dry lips, spinning mind
Mood-thrashing thoughts
It looks beautiful on the outside
Pretty and pale
Like a best friend

This^ is great.

If the whole poem was like this then I'd really like it.

The vagueness that Mehm mentioned (it isn't instantly apparent what you're talking about) doesn't bother me at all. I don't think poetry needs to be obvious.

 

[DamagedLemon]

I know what you mean and will take that into account, thank you for the constructive criticism!

I didn't spend too long writing this - maybe 5 minutes - I was teaching a kindergarten class and they were sat jotting down stuff from the board.

 

[leiphos]

Overall, I like this a lot. It's a very good description of what it feels like not to give a shit about anything. I didn't get the heroin part, but I like that it's not specific. The only part that was off for me was the beginning. "Spinning" and "Mood-thrashing" are too active and distressed for the speaker's mood. This poem's tone is far too mellow for that kind of opening. I would start with "It looks beautiful on the outside."

The last line has very religious overtones, obviously. I just wanted to let you know that for me, it changed the meaning of the poem into something like: God has brought the speaker to this place of "nothingness," a kind of eternity. On my first read I thought it was about death, to be honest - simply due to that last line.

That being said, I think it's a fine ending. It works perfectly well. But I just wanted to let you know how I read it, in case you are uncomfortable with opening your poem up to that interpretation.

I like the first half of it, but I think it loses it towards the end when you start asking questions. I think the questions detract noticeably from the piece. 'Might it have been' and 'perhaps' bother me. They sound a bit pretentious or something, definitely out of place, anyway.

Questions in poems are great in almost all cases. Really, they are a kind of trick. They bring the reader into the poem and give the illusion that the speaker's monologue is really a dialogue, which allows for more accessibility.

In terms of the phrasing, though, I agree. "Might it have been" is not pretentious, in my opinion, but it is very indirect. In fact, it's one of the indirect terms listed in Strunk & White, if I remember correctly. You could just say: "Was it another opening?" That way you reduce the amount of syllables and words while still retaining the meaning. "Perhaps" didn't bother me, though I can understand your argument against it; it's very high-register for such a colloquial poem.

 

[manic_panic]

props!

hey yall well honestly didn't catch the whole thing bein bout H-bomb but you have a fascinating style of writing, really.. what you've shared here-- it's riveting, thus pulling the reader into your world (which for the reader, may be hard to understand or interpret). what ya see is what ya get, it's never 1 dimensional. I see pain, abandonment, grace, isolation, serenity, goodness, and warmth.. muchLove!

 

[lostNfound]

Thank you.

It's about Heroin Was trying to make it as vague as possible so it could be related to anything.

Reading this reminded of how I feel falling asleep alone at night, every night.

 

[DamagedLemon]

Reading this reminded of how I feel falling asleep alone at night, every night.

Aww *hug*

Thanks very much for all your comments. I'm going to keep writing and hopefully put more things up - unfortunately I am more of a prose person but we'll see how things go.