Depression

[poe]

It announces itself at the door,
a steel pointed probe,
ridiculous laugh. Neck-back-arched
guffaw.

You stand in the center of a stagnant pool. No
colors to be sure
but gray and cool they slink about like rootless spooks,
checking your soft core with that steel prod.

Your body parts iron ball and chain you to a gloom-spelled doom.

The echoing of water dripping in some far off iron chamber
slows down to a groan where sound waves ooze
like pimpled oil.
The mercury bar falls, and with it its silence
a baffling crash.

Oh, but windows are a fright now,
letting in blasted light and skin and bones and
frailties which despise. Pink mouths and their
castle white teeth mechanically moving up and down, toot tooting,
faster and faster,
out of rhythm or sense.

In the bleak city where buildings loom over pulled
shrieks in alien sounds of metal pipes and cars,
the olden days flash by: a black and white still of a horse drawn carriage and a black top hats silhouette against the building's
sky.
And far from the madding crowd, in some penthouse apartment,
those honking, shrieking, howling calls rise, and coalesce,
high up in the sky, where they blur, and hum, and rush into a comforting drone, like a reassuring clock tick, ticking away.

You doze in your cedar smelling attic room where paper dolls dangle from your sweetly lazy arm.

[Jinxy]

It announces itself at the door,
a steel pointed probe,
ridiculous laugh. Neck-back-arched neck-back-arched? very awkward wording. Just because you use a hypen doesn't mean that a "neck-back" is now a thing.
guffaw. one word verses are not the greatest, this gives no more emphasis than having a one-verse "guffaw with an arched back" or what have you

You stand in the center of a stagnant pool. No
colors to be sure
but gray and cool they slink about like rootless spooks, who is "they"? no idea wha'ts going on here
checking your soft core with that steel prod. "they" and "it" are the same? Doesn't work


Your body parts iron ball and chain you to a gloom-spelled doom. terribly awkward. If you really have to include the iron ball, then denote a body part that is like the chain, and one that is like the ball. Right now your entire body (unspecific body parts=whole body to the reader), 1 thing, is a ball and chain, 2 things.

"your head an iron ball with
spine a dooming chain"

That's still not very good but you get the idea : P

... where sound waves ooze
like pimpled oil. "Ooze like pimpled oil" is nice imagery, but i cant wrap my head around sound waves oozing .
The mercury bar falls, and with it its silence When you say "the mercury bar" you are talking about a specific mercury bar. What mercury bar? This just came out of nowhere. "with its silence a baffling crash" the falling bar is silent? The room is not "it" when you say "it" right after you talk about some mercury bar.
a baffling crash.


In the bleak city where buildings loom over pulled
shrieks in alien sounds of metal pipes and cars, This is total nonsense, read it aloud

the olden days flash by: a black and white still of a horse drawn carriage and a black top hats silhouette against the building's
sky. there are 30 syllables in the above line, and 1 here. There are 24 words above, and one word here. That does not work. Also, read this aloud. The building's sky? what?

[heslopian]

I really enjoyed this poem, though it sometimes feels more like a string of disconnected, if impressive, images than a real poetic narrative. The last couple of verses are my favourite, because they create a strong, powerful landscape which moves elegantly into a claustrophobic space. The "paper dolls" and "bleak city" are especially memorable. My advice would be to make a stronger narrative core, which links your verses to a clear structure with a beginning, middle and end, if you know what I mean.
I'm also not fond of really long lines in poems of otherwise vaguely consistent breaks, though that's a personal aesthetic choice. Thank you very much for the read, and I can see why you call yourself Poe

[71degrees]

It announces itself at the door,
a steel pointed probe,
ridiculous laugh. Neck-back-arched
guffaw.

You stand in the center of a stagnant pool. No
colors to be sure
but gray and cool they slink about like rootless spooks,
checking your soft core with that steel prod.

Your body parts iron ball and chain you to a gloom-spelled doom.

The echoing of water dripping in some far off iron chamber
slows down to a groan where sound waves ooze
like pimpled oil.
The mercury bar falls, and with it its silence
a baffling crash.

Oh, but windows are a fright now,
letting in blasted light and skin and bones and
frailties which despise. Pink mouths and their
castle white teeth mechanically moving up and down, toot tooting,
faster and faster,
out of rhythm or sense.

In the bleak city where buildings loom over pulled
shrieks in alien sounds of metal pipes and cars,
the olden days flash by: a black and white still of a horse drawn carriage and a black top hats silhouette against the building's
sky.
And far from the madding crowd, in some penthouse apartment,
those honking, shrieking, howling calls rise, and coalesce,
high up in the sky, where they blur, and hum, and rush into a comforting drone, like a reassuring clock tick, ticking away.

You doze in your cedar smelling attic room where paper dolls dangle from your sweetly lazy arm.

The poem seems a bit "bi-polar" at times (e.g. "…your body parts iron ball and chain you…") or ("…dangle from your sweetly lazy arm."). I like images that make me work. B/c of the title and the opening personification, I know what I'm getting into so I'm okay with it.

"…far from the maddening crowd..." is a really nice literary allusion. Bravo.

Would love to see this in first person. Second person separates the narrator from the depression. First person would bring it down to the narrator's level where it should be. You're giving too much away and not taking license for the topic by presenting this in second person. Can you tell I don't like it in second person?

Nice poem. Difficult topic. Good luck w/this.

[Erthona]

This poem seems misdiagnosed. Depression? Depression on acid maybe. This line does seem like depression's physical effects:

"Your body parts iron ball and chain you to a gloom-spelled doom."

everything is a tremendous effort, I get that, but the rest...

To me the writer still seem to be searching for a way to describe what is experienced, or maybe this is purely and external view, although there are aspect here that make me think the writer has first hand experience with this. Still, if the title didn't tell me, I would have no idea what this was about.

Dale

[Anonymous]

I liked the second to last stanza a lot where you present imagery of a person rotting away because of their depression. This seemed to more give the reader a picture of what it may look like to an onlooker to a suffer of depression-- even though this is exaggerated (it's art though hehe). I would have liked it had you included some of the disturbing thoughts or feelings that the victim must suffer through everyday. The intro kind of hits the reader with a bang; not sure if that's what you were intending, because depression is more a disorder that creeps up and slowly traps the victim within its grasps.

[ChristopherSea]

Poe, there are some fantastic images herein and I got a real steam-punk quality from your atmosphere, metal works, carriage, top hat, clock, etc.

The majority of the poem evokes more of a paranoid or schizophrenic state of mind for me. I would not recognize this character as clinically depressed, but I am not a psychologist. Nonetheless, you have depicted the character’s imprisoned, isolated and inhibited condition.

Some better line breaks could tighten the piece up. Specifically, the breaks on ‘no’, ‘and’, ‘their’, are weaker ones. Some of the stand alone words and phrases seem haphazard,e.g. ‘guffaw’, ‘sky’. While other lines and unnecessarily long.

Perhaps some things to think about for your next edit. Overall the imagery is great. Cheers/Chris

[tectak]

It announces itself at the door,
a steel pointed probe,
ridiculous laugh. Neck-back-arched
guffaw.

You stand in the center of a stagnant pool. No
colors to be sure
but gray and cool they slink about like rootless spooks,
checking your soft core with that steel prod.

Your body parts iron ball and chain you to a gloom-spelled doom.

The echoing of water dripping in some far off iron chamber
slows down to a groan where sound waves ooze
like pimpled oil.
The mercury bar falls, and with it its silence
a baffling crash.

Oh, but windows are a fright now,
letting in blasted light and skin and bones and
frailties which despise. Pink mouths and their
castle white teeth mechanically moving up and down, toot tooting,
faster and faster,
out of rhythm or sense.

In the bleak city where buildings loom over pulled
shrieks in alien sounds of metal pipes and cars,
the olden days flash by: a black and white still of a horse drawn carriage and a black top hats silhouette against the building's
sky.
And far from the madding crowd, in some penthouse apartment,
those honking, shrieking, howling calls rise, and coalesce,
high up in the sky, where they blur, and hum, and rush into a comforting drone, like a reassuring clock tick, ticking away.

You doze in your cedar smelling attic room where paper dolls dangle from your sweetly lazy arm.

hy po,
Hmmm....sorry about the pun...it is easy to be flippant about this sort of commitment verse but there is a whole lot to consider before making any judgement on the poetic merit. You may well have begun with the end, it certainly appears to rush down a funnel in to a conclusive bucket, getting faster and faster as it does so....but your namesake in his Maelstrom managed to keep in touch with the reader whereas this does not;as someone else pointed out it may benefit from a conversion to first person BUT you would still need to tidy up the imagery so that the one chain that holds the piece together is made of connected links rather binding yourself up in several unconnected chains...it is just too fragmented.
So, not to be flippant, I can see much of what you want me to see...there are some solid chunks being lugged around like "..but gray and cool they slink about like rootless spooks,
checking your soft core with that steel prod." Who could argue with that....but what does it do to keep the chain intact? Your next line, "...Your body parts iron ball and chain you to a gloom-spelled doom."
uses a complex verb construct which just leaves the building as it is so far away from the crux of the piece...not that I am entirely confident that I know what the crux is...and there is the root problem, I don't think you do either.
To square the circle then, it reads as if you had a good end and cast about for the rest of it; adding strange cameo collisions one after the other until we have a fine old car crash.
S1 What does " It" L1 refer to? Ah, you will tell me....no...the sentence structure collapses immediately and I am unsure whether "it" is a steel pointed probe, a ridiculous laugh or the tautologically inseperable guffaw. You think that is unfair? Well, here is the stanza AS you wrote it.
"It announces itself at the door, a steel pointed probe, ridiculous laugh. Neck-back-arched guffaw." Pick the sense out of the imagery...you cannot. Nor can I.
S2 is made disconnected because "it" has given way to "you". Who...me? Whoa! We now have some grey "theys"...who they?
....and so it goes on.
Milo makes great noises on the subject of central or core metaphor. This piece gives his argument in favour of such a basic premise, massive credibility.
On the plus side, it is refreshing to see such diverse and off the wall thinking...but it needs to be controlled or the beast, who is bad verse, will get you.
Best,
tectak

[poe]

It announces itself at the door,
a steel pointed probe,
ridiculous laugh. Neck-back-arched
guffaw.

You stand in the center of a stagnant pool. No
colors to be sure
but gray and cool they slink about like rootless spooks,
checking your soft core with that steel prod.

Your body parts iron ball and chain you to a gloom-spelled doom.

The echoing of water dripping in some far off iron chamber
slows down to a groan where sound waves ooze
like pimpled oil.
The mercury bar falls, and with it its silence
a baffling crash.

Oh, but windows are a fright now,
letting in blasted light and skin and bones and
frailties which despise. Pink mouths and their
castle white teeth mechanically moving up and down, toot tooting,
faster and faster,
out of rhythm or sense.

In the bleak city where buildings loom over pulled
shrieks in alien sounds of metal pipes and cars,
the olden days flash by: a black and white still of a horse drawn carriage and a black top hats silhouette against the building's
sky.
And far from the madding crowd, in some penthouse apartment,
those honking, shrieking, howling calls rise, and coalesce,
high up in the sky, where they blur, and hum, and rush into a comforting drone, like a reassuring clock tick, ticking away.

You doze in your cedar smelling attic room where paper dolls dangle from your sweetly lazy arm.

hy po,
Hmmm....sorry about the pun...it is easy to be flippant about this sort of commitment verse but there is a whole lot to consider before making any judgement on the poetic merit. You may well have begun with the end, it certainly appears to rush down a funnel in to a conclusive bucket, getting faster and faster as it does so....but your namesake in his Maelstrom managed to keep in touch with the reader whereas this does not;as someone else pointed out it may benefit from a conversion to first person BUT you would still need to tidy up the imagery so that the one chain that holds the piece together is made of connected links rather binding yourself up in several unconnected chains...it is just too fragmented.
So, not to be flippant, I can see much of what you want me to see...there are some solid chunks being lugged around like "..but gray and cool they slink about like rootless spooks,
checking your soft core with that steel prod." Who could argue with that....but what does it do to keep the chain intact? Your next line, "...Your body parts iron ball and chain you to a gloom-spelled doom."
uses a complex verb construct which just leaves the building as it is so far away from the crux of the piece...not that I am entirely confident that I know what the crux is...and there is the root problem, I don't think you do either.
To square the circle then, it reads as if you had a good end and cast about for the rest of it; adding strange cameo collisions one after the other until we have a fine old car crash.
S1 What does " It" L1 refer to? Ah, you will tell me....no...the sentence structure collapses immediately and I am unsure whether "it" is a steel pointed probe, a ridiculous laugh or the tautologically inseperable guffaw. You think that is unfair? Well, here is the stanza AS you wrote it.
"It announces itself at the door, a steel pointed probe, ridiculous laugh. Neck-back-arched guffaw." Pick the sense out of the imagery...you cannot. Nor can I.
S2 is made disconnected because "it" has given way to "you". Who...me? Whoa! We now have some grey "theys"...who they?
....and so it goes on.
Milo makes great noises on the subject of central or core metaphor. This piece gives his argument in favour of such a basic premise, massive credibility.
On the plus side, it is refreshing to see such diverse and off the wall thinking...but it needs to be controlled or the beast, who is bad verse, will get you.
Best,
tectak

Hmmm,
Thank you all for your time. There's much to ponder.
poe