My Poetry: Please give advice

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hi please take the time to read this poem. Please give me constuctive critisim. Feel free to post your poems on and I will do the same for you. I opened a topic like this before in the past and it was a great success so I hope it will be a success again.

The pain seering though my leg,
Blood ripped from my body,
Metal Rafters Stabed through my bed,
Door collapsed, no way to escape.

Ceilings not goin to hold,
crumbling,fracturing
this is the end,
the end of me.

I've dreamt of this day,
The possible pain,torture, and suffering,
It fascinated me.

I wanted it to happen,
I waited for the day,
Now its truly here,
do i truly want to die?

i think about friends,
The attempts I made to end it myself,
The scars on my arm,my wrists,...my life,
Do I want to die? Is this the end?

PS please forgive the awfull spelling

[ December 04, 2003, 13:57: Message edited by: Taluntain ]

 

Hmmm. I think you'd be better served by putting this into a short story. The tone here is more narrative than poetic.

It's not the subject matter. Sylvia Plath and others did plenty of dark stuff.

If you really want it to be a poem, try being less literal. For example, instead of saying, "I think about friends," try inserting his thoughts -- "Jimmy, Bobby, little Ernie..." -- and leave it to the reader to figure out that he's thinking about friends.

 

Thanks for the advice I'll do that and see what I think of it.

 

Well, a poem should (although poetry has no real rules) say something without saying it. Does this represent something else? Or is it on the surface: representing the last minute mind of a suicide victim?

If it does mean something else, than distort it a little. Nobody can tell you how to write poetry... but I can tell you this. That peom didn't speak to me. It kinda made me feel sick and I wanted it to be over. Try and make it a little less verbal, and a lot more emotional. Say something without saying it.

 

I would also say make it more narrative or more poetical. A bit one way or the other. You can make just a story that is divided in strophes and uses a bit more poetic language. You could make it all rhyme and follow some metrum. The choice is yours.

So, I believe what it needs most is some tuning, a few surgical cuts here and there. Like for example the "The possible pain,torture, and suffering," line, which seems to me too long. Perhaps you could split it in two and have another strophe of four verses rather than an odd three in the middle.

Try to add more appeal, too. Imagine not what you would like to say, but what you would like the others to see. If you want your readers to catch the idea quickly or if you want them to ponder it for a longer time and perhaps not succeed at all. Or maybe you want them to wonder what you might have possibly wanted to say. Now go!