untitled(critique required please!!!)

necromercurian

its the wait that makes the want so much worse,
knowing youre somewhere wasting your touch
while i linger here
dragging
seconds
from
my
spine
waiting
for the time between
you
and
i
to stumble away
with the elegance i lack.
my smile is still in your arms,
while my sighs malinger
feeding on the terror of your absence,
horror of my loneliness,
emptiness of the hours,
minutes,
days,
apart.
my heart is a hollow egg-
the fragments are fragile
and the balance is delicate,
treat it with trepidation
and all treat you with sweetness and tears.

Madou

Type-o on the last line means crescendo plays out on a bum note. I know it's ****ty to say but couldn't get over that and screwed it up for me, then I started reading back over it and I probably got into over-analysing the thing. Now this is going to seem really critical, but it's not, it's just frustration that I see what you want to express, but it's distorted by bad wording.

So, some of the turns of phrase seem somewhat confused - "you and I to stumble away with the elegance i lack". Surely you mean the elegance "we lack", or are you implying that such is the narrator's inelegant way of conducting himself that he poisons the coupling with his inelegance? It didn't read right for me.

"Dragging seconds from my spine" - just basically nonplussed by that one.

"my heart is a hollow egg- the fragments are fragile". Can something hollow be in fragments? Surely the heart is already broken if there's fragments(?). Poetic license doesn't mean one can skirt basic logic and physics.

Also, "treat it [heart] with trepidation". Is trepidation the right word, here? You want this guy/girl to treat your heart with fear or unease.

As I said before, somewhat confused...

nicowa

(Always, always, take what I say with a pinch of salt. Unless I'm saying nice things.)

First the good. I empathise with this so much. I'm in a long distance relationship and I feel like the "I" speaking in this.

"my smile is still in your arms,"

I like this.

"its the wait that makes the want so much worse,
knowing youre somewhere wasting your touch"

And I think both of us (him and I) both know this.

But (and now the not so good) some of the lines suffer from a lack of punctuation. And others suffer from over dramatisation.

That's no to say that formating doesn't have its place in poetry. But some of the lines here would read better side by side.

"for the time between
you and i"


or even

for the time between
"you
and i" .

"spine,
waiting "

This needed a comma. Well, that's my thought on it.

"my heart is a hollow egg-
the fragments are fragile
and the balance is delicate,"

The second two lines have a beauty to them but the imagery of the hollow egg is slightly contrary to the idea of fragments. Try thinking about it as something fused together, where you can see the joins. Then think of the joins as the most fragile position - where a small tap could break the whole. It's an idea that more easily fits your imagery here.

"you
and
i
to stumble away
with the elegance i lack."

A comma or a dash would break the sentence here and allow the reader to understand that it is the "I" who stumbles through the passing waiting seconds with inelegance.

All in all, I do like this poem and if you wanted to take some of the advice dispenced here and give the poem a second (or third or fourth - depended on how much rewriting it has already been through ) writing, then I for one would love to see it.

As a final note, if you're going to repost - and I hope you do - then would you run it through a spell checker for the "it's, its" and "I"'s.

Thanks and good luck!!

pickarooney

When you suck the insides out of an egg, the shell cracks into pieces but are still held together by the membrane inside. There's nothing logically wrong with that metaphor.

Bad grammar elsewhere ruins the poem though; it just reads like a bunch of words you want to put into a poem without paying much attention to the structure. What does the scattergun approach to line truncation bring to the poem?

Also, as above "dragging seconds from your spine"? It's an intriguing juxtaposition that no combination of the various meanings of the individual words really eludidates. Maybe you could?

Antilles

I'm not usually one to comment on poetry, but this really needs a lot of work, OP. It reads like you got one of those poetry generators that use existing poems to create new ones with words that are vaguely linked.

You need to get some structure in there, and keep your metaphors straight.

"My smile is in your arms" - that's a push at best, and as above the bit about the spine makes no sense. Is the spine meant to symbolise courage?

Matt Holck

dragging seconds---
from my spine
waiting---
for the time
between you and i

that's how I would speak it

necromercurian

firstly the typo...well,i got back to it too late to edit the post.

"my heart is a hollow egg- the fragments are fragile".
'Can something hollow be in fragments? Surely the heart is already broken if there's fragments(?).
Poetic license doesn't mean one can skirt basic logic and physics.'

unfortunately basic logic and physics arent the basis of all human emotion and thought,
therefore,i think 'poetic licence' is a pretty reaonable excuse to skirt around the cold hard facts
of mechanical operation.that the heart is hollow and fragmented i think implies
that the heart has been broken and
shoddily repaired-hence,"the balance is delicate".

as for trepidation,you'd handle something youve
already broken with unease incase you broke it again,so,thats that one.

"dragging seconds from my spine"
waiting becomes a physical labour...and thats just how i could portray that anxiety.

luvvie dahling

Can you say this poem off by heart with your eyes closed?
I suggest you do so if you can.
You might find the words arranging themselves a little differently.
' the elegance....I lack' I think could be quite lovely.
The poem is heartfelt ( I think), and logic and grammar aren't as important( I think ) asthe music of the words.

Does it sound like what it is?
To you?
If so, then well done and now you can go write something else.