Who Am I?

[savannah]

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.

Hi @easywayout, thank you for your extended critique.

I understand that S1 does not start off the best way, and has not much to say. I may have to edit it myself.

In S2, while sponge does mean absorbing information, it also means that N wants to write in his own voice, but ends up being influenced by others' greatness and tries to emulate their styles, thinking that they are far better than him. That is why he is crouching in others' shadows. I understand this is not the best expression, at the time of writing this poem it was the best way I could visualize it.
In S3, I understand the metaphors are a mess, and all over the place. At this moment they are disjointed, and no progression between them. And although N feels he can climb up the ladder, occasionally an obstacle will tear him apart, making him lose confidence and sense of who he is. This corresponds to the words he wants to use for himself. 
Thanks again for your critique.