Who Am I?

[easywayout]

I scribble this question again and again
in my diary, blunt pencil and a fistful of doubt,
hoping to find a mirror in a bed of words.

I long to be a signature, but morph into a sponge,
crouching in the shadows of others, 
for a drop of greatness.
Give me your metaphors that glow like comets,
lighting up an audience.
Throw me a word of praise I can wear like an epithet.

I am a castle of dreams, slave to failure,
a believer in ladders to zeniths from rock bottom.
Every so often, a broken rung scrapes against my skin,
sands the edges of a person still forming,
and the conundrum in my heart grows,
in search of a word, an adjective
for those growing blank spaces.

Perhaps, when I've collected enough words,
I would be everything.

Savannah,

In my opinion, the strongest section of this poem - because it has the most concrete imagery, and is the clearest to understand - is S2. N seems not to be asking ‘Who am I?’, but ‘How can I be unique?’. To that end, I suggest getting rid of S1 and S4 altogether. Likewise S3L4-6. They really don’t add anything, and the last three lines of S3 are full of abstract images.

S2L1: I like ‘long to be a signature’ - it suggests N craves importance (e.g. a powerful corporate role), or posthumous (?) fame.
In S2L4-5, who exactly is ‘Give me...’ addressed to? N’s muse, the reader, the audience she sees herself performing in front of? ‘glow like comets’ is a great line - very vivid.
‘Sponge/crouching’ is rather an odd image. Even if we rearrange it so that the two images are entirely separate (‘I am crouching in the shadows of others; I am a sponge’), this leaves the problem that sponges don’t absorb just one drop (S2L3). They absorb everything - there is a reason for the expression ‘soaking it up like a sponge’. This is actually saying the opposite of what you seem to intend. You might say something like ‘I am a sponge/soaking up greatness’ (but better than that). I see the N’s sponge status as positive - absorbing lots of styles and voices from several different perspectives. After all, that’s how we learn - we mimic first, we read voraciously from lots of different places, we practise, we fail, then we develop our own poetic/artistic voice.

In the next stanza, N goes from ‘crouching’ and being a ‘sponge’ to climbing. I like the sense of progression, but I suggest changing it to something like ‘I am climbing from rock bottom to zenith’. It’s clear from the preceding strophe that N believes she can succeed.

S3L1: ‘Castle of dreams’ is incongruous with the ladder image, and isn’t telling us anything we don’t know already. Besides which, it doesn’t seem to make sense. As I said above, I actually see failure as a positive in the context of learning and growing, but clearly your N is unhappy about it. Perhaps something like ‘I am shackled to failure’, and then extend the shackle metaphor to talk about how that failure has helped N grow. Was that what you were trying to get at? This may work instead of broken rungs sanding N’s skin (S3L3-4). It doesn’t make sense for a broken rung to ‘sand’ anything, and sanding skin sounds extraordinarily painful. Alternately, I read this as N saying the system is broken. Could you do anything with that - tell us a story, say, describe an incident where N met someone in the industry who disillusioned her?

Hope this has helped.

Cheers
EWO.