I apologise in advance for taking a couple of liberties with your poem. Firstly, I changed the title of the thread because typos annoy me (after trying very hard to work out if it was a deliberate misspelling, some kind of pun, because those are the thoughts that consume me). Secondly, I've removed your formatting so that I can do a line-by-line critique. While I appreciate creative use of white space, I must comment that I found this excessive and more gimmicky than poetically relevant. Every element of a poem should serve a purpose -- there isn't that much space to play with and it's a shame to waste it. This is a stylistic decision, but be aware that because of the white space, a reader will not necessarily follow the left-to-right, top-to-bottom conventions and if you want your words to be read in the order you choose for them, throwing them all over the page is not helpful. White space can disempower words as much as, or more than, it empowers silence.
(03-24-2016, 10:20 AM)porcelain bones Wrote: Soliloquy
I am -- the opening line leads me naturally to Descartes, and because you had solipsism out by itself in the middle of nowhere, my brain immediately goes to "does this poem want me to think of Descartes as a solipsist?" and straight away I'm distracted. I assume this won't happen to everyone... but it was definitely an effort to return to the second line.
drawing smart this string slipped -- this might be improved with "smartly"
loop-ways ‘round my index finger -- I think we've evolved enough to drop the apostrophe here
watching all that delicious colour -- I find the assonant link between colour and hurry quite delicious
hurry
out of it,
solipsism. -- this problematic beastie. It deserves a colon after "it" if you're going to keep it -- but I genuinely don't see its necessity as I feel it falls into the telling, not showing category of writing. It's also a bit heavy-handed given the title of the poem and its content, which is clearly internal and referencing only the self's experiences/consciousness.
filling up the vacancy with yum— -- this is the most disturbing line for me. It makes me all squirmy. This is good poetry
suddenly
I’ve lost grasp of it and it -- what is wrong with just "I lose"?
falls
between my hungry fingertips,
falling with a supple flourish of aerial panache, -- do you really need all the falls? You could lose "falling" here and improve momentum.
it falls out of hand and into the hole, fallen -- again, "out of hand and into hole" would work fine without falls -- repetition should always serve a solid purpose and I can't see it in action here
—if only it was so crude as a god
standing over, rug in hand, smirk slapped -- a smirk is a sneaky thing and slapped sounds very abrupt -- what about "smirk smeared" to maintain your alliteration and make it a little ickier?
sardonically across face—
falling/it’s fallen/to fall/it’s falling/it falls/ -- the repetition works here...
when did it fall ? -- but not here. You could lose this line and it would take nothing from the poem
the string will fall
forever, I think -- and we're back to Descartes, which makes a good set of bookends (but only without solipsism buggering it all up)