01-22-2016, 11:59 PM
(01-22-2016, 01:34 PM)Skye Wrote: Don’t you THINK I know?This is very expressive, while also including effective narrative and description. You show much rather than tell, but also tell narratively in first-person.
How alone I’ve been?
How alone I am?
Even when you’re home?
Rocking on the bathroom floor
Back and forth back and forth
Manic laughter primal sobs
I WATCHED myself lose it
Don’t you THINK I know?
How bad it is?
How far I’ve fallen?
Everything I’ve lost?
Grieving into the silence
Screaming myself numb
My toes were frozen on the tile
I SAW my crazy eyes reflected
Who the hell was there?
Whose arms wrapped tightly
Around my shoulder blades
In the dark at 3am?
Technically, some will dislike capitalizing at the beginning of each line even when it's the continuation of a sentence (or at all), calling it archaic. I have no problem with it, though it's seldom seen these days in blank verse such as this. To me, it adds someting because it feels like fast-breathing in hysteria, sentences broken up by hiccups and gasps rather than typographic convention. Other critics may differ.
Beginning most lines with an accented syllable (trochee or the like) adds to the above effect - I picture the speaker's head snapping forward in anger or desperatioin.
My one confusion is exactly whom the speaker is addressing. Early in the poem, it would be a spouse, lover, or roommate who's not helping. Later (and, retrospectively, what came before) it seems more like the speaker's "other" personality, the sane or insane one compared with who's complaining about it. I also thought it might be the speaker's drug of abuse - the location in the bathroom, as when suffering withdrawal cramps - but on the whole, think it's the other self. What convinced me of that was embrace around the shoulder blades: even tried it to see if one person could manage it (yes), and a physically other person, unless very tall, would tend to embrace lower down on the back.
My only technical critique was reflection (of those eyes, presumably in a mirror) while the speaker is curled or sitting on the tiles. Couldn't fit a full-length mirror into the construct, so placed a wall-to-wall mirror above a counter, motel-fashion, with the speaker peeking above it to see the speaker's own distraught eyes.
Good, emotional expression. Next, think how you're going to top it!
Non-practicing atheist

