Murder

[blazekitty14]

Very edgy, but It has some errors, keep up the good work.

[Todd]

Very edgy, but It has some errors, keep up the good work.

In the serious forum, please try to point out some of the errors so the poet can correct them on revision. You need to go a bit further in this particular forum: observation than explanation.

Thanks,

Todd

[Truerenigma]

the edit is showing some good progress. The line breaks/lengths and the pacing is much better. I can follow it now. Not only is the poem improving, so is your eye and ear.

I think you should reconsider "our turn had come". The phrase is very worn out. "The usual suspect" as well, even "spotted". Maybe you could say something like "the suspect was seen in a stalkers cap three doors down but who knew he would come for us? "

anything really.

[LorettaYoung]

[quote='ChristopherSea' pid='163431' dateline='1402493734']
[b]Murder

The suspect
had been spotted
around the neighborhood in the past do[/b]had been and in the past say the same thing.
coming for others,
but it was our season now.
Nights were busy
dilating, growing iciclesnot sure why dilating?
as perfect murder weapons.

Death came to our home
on stilts, peered through
our frosted bedroom
window and saw: that kisses
leave tiny bruises which amass
until the kissing stops;
that we went to bed
in mute silence, slept dreamless;
that we were not conscious
of how to love without killing
ourselves in the process. Death offered
autonomy, a nascent leaf,
an algal bloom of possibilities.

Foul play
was eventually uncoveredame question about using eventually and late mornng.
in late morning when authorities
dragged the pond
behind the house and discovered
the missing bodies

of our hollow wedding vows.

I find the twist between real death and the metaphor very close. I think this is interesting; gave me a feeling of dread. Loretta
[/quote]

---

Hi Chris: In my view, your edit 2 has come long way; increasing the metaphor of death that enhances the story of the problem; love. I think the read is rhythmic now; I have a small suggestion, I was wondering how it would sound if your turned bedroom next to window on the next line and have a subtle pause there. Just a thought, a very enjoyable read now. Best Loretta

[ChristopherSea]

Here is some information on Time dilation. It is a real phenomenon:

1. time dilation
noun
: a slowing of time in accordance with the theory of relativity that occurs in a system in motion relative to an outside observer and that becomes apparent especially as the speed of the system approaches that of light —called also time dilatation

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation

3. Does time dilate during a threatening situation? http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/...situation/

4. Time dilation is also associated with psychotropic drugs: 'Many psychoactive drugs, even well-known ones like acid and mushrooms, cause time dilation. Time is relative, and these drugs can affect the way your neurons are interacting in a way that makes time feel like it’s going much slower. Furthermore, some not yet developed psychoactive drugs could cause you to go into a multi-day hallucinatory experience, like a dream, where you’re living out uninterrupted weeks of living in your mind.'

Chris

---

Thanks for the second reads TruE and Loretta. Much obliged Tom. A third edit is forth coming./Chris

[ellajam]

Hi, Chris, I've been enjoying this from the start, sorry it's taken me so long to buckle down and give some critique on it. I love the way it portrays a relationship drained of all warmth in such an interesting way. here are some notes.

Loretta/Dale/QDS/Cy/TtheLion/TruE edit2 Thanks again.

Murder

The usual suspect was spotted
in the neighborhood coming for others,
but our turn had come. Nights dilated
and became frigid, growing icicles
as potential murder weapons.
I like the neighborhood prowler, it shows this is not a unique situation. I'm not a fan of the coming/come that appeared in this edit. Maybe something like "hunting for others" could work. Love the rest, especially icicles as weapons, chilling image.


Death came to our home on stilts,
peered through our frosted bedroom
window and saw that kisses
leave tiny bruises which amass
until the kissing ceases,
that we went to bed silent,
slept dreamless, unconscious
of how to love without killing
one another. Inviting death
into the house that night offered
autonomy, a nascent leaf in life,
an algal bloom of possibilities.
Yes to the stilts, death took efforts to reach up there and found ripe pickings. Yes to kisses that leave tiny bruises that amass and the welcome to a death that opens the door to new beginnings.

By late next morning, authorities
dragged the pond behind the house
and discovered the missing bodies

of our hollow wedding vows.
Hollow wedding vows is a bit leaden, more common sounding than the rest of the poem. I can't think of a great substitute, but I know you could if you decide to.

Thanks for posting your work on this, interesting reading.

[ChristopherSea]

Hi, Chris, I've been enjoying this from the start, sorry it's taken me so long to buckle down and give some critique on it. I love the way it portrays a relationship drained of all warmth in such an interesting way. here are some notes.

Loretta/Dale/QDS/Cy/TtheLion/TruE edit2 Thanks again.

Murder

The usual suspect was spotted
in the neighborhood coming for others,
but our turn had come. Nights dilated
and became frigid, growing icicles
as potential murder weapons.
I like the neighborhood prowler, it shows this is not a unique situation. I'm not a fan of the coming/come that appeared in this edit. Maybe something like "hunting for others" could work. Love the rest, especially icicles as weapons, chilling image.


Death came to our home on stilts,
peered through our frosted bedroom
window and saw that kisses
leave tiny bruises which amass
until the kissing ceases,
that we went to bed silent,
slept dreamless, unconscious
of how to love without killing
one another. Inviting death
into the house that night offered
autonomy, a nascent leaf in life,
an algal bloom of possibilities.
Yes to the stilts, death took efforts to reach up there and found ripe pickings. Yes to kisses that leave tiny bruises that amass and the welcome to a death that opens the door to new beginnings.

By late next morning, authorities
dragged the pond behind the house
and discovered the missing bodies

of our hollow wedding vows.
Hollow wedding vows is a bit leaden, more common sounding than the rest of the poem. I can't think of a great substitute, but I know you could if you decide to.

Thanks for posting your work on this, interesting reading.

Thank you so much ella, my next edit will be based on this feedback.

[Truerenigma]

Hi chris.
Just one thing real quick to think about until come back.
I like that you chose to go with a simpler, more accessible, American Fiction sentence structure in S2, but now the "it" that keeps popping up is a bit of a bother. I'm sure you can find a workaround so that you can keep the cleaner, sleeker sentences without needing them both.

[ChristopherSea]

Hi chris.
Just one thing real quick to think about until come back.
I like that you chose to go with a simpler, more accessible, American Fiction sentence structure in S2, but now the "it" that keeps popping up is a bit of a bother. I'm sure you can find a workaround so that you can keep the cleaner, sleeker sentences without needing them both.

Yes I see, now that you mention it truE. Those two 'It's do stand out like sore thumbs. I used them to address Tom's problem with the run on sentence. However, I can readily remove one of them with the restoration of a comma. Thanks so much./Chris

[kliS]

I'm going to go on a bit of a tangent, this is a bit of a rant related to a lot of poetry I see. Also my critique might not be immediately useful to this piece unless you are ready for a huge overhaul, but perhaps you will find these ideas useful somehow here or if not, then your future pieces.

So for example this is a twist:

We read the poem. It's about this subject matter, and goes towards A direction, it goes left a bit right a bit, but we basically kind of see the kind of scenery you do when you go through direction A, so a bunch of vegetation, maybe some wildlife, then at the very end it veers off to direction B which is a cliff and we realize that all along the driver was trying to commit suicide the whole way and we had no clue holy shit

How comes this to be? One way is that we the reader is completely fooled even though technically there's no plot holes that makes this sudden and swift change technically incorrect and essentially we've all been had even though there's been nothing in this poem all the way that implies the reader is suicidal. The other way is that the imagery throughout the poem is morbid and dark, and congruently relates to the mindstate of the writer but everyone basically everyone knows what's it going on and direction A pretty much acts as a cover or metaphor for B and when it ends it's just kind of, um yeah k.

If it's not clear neither extremes are good ideas. There are limitations to whichever approach anyway, but the thing in general is that there must be a strong and organic (I keep using this word but srysly) link between A and B. Right now it feels like your poem isn't sure what it's trying to do. You basically spell it out throughout the poem, and then in case people missed it you have to put up a signpost in bold font "BTW THIS IS USING MURDER AS A MELODRAMATIC METAPHOR FOR BREAKING A RELATIONSHIP VIA CHEATING OR WTEVER (i hope its not too trite or nothing)". Yes, I said this comparison is trite, but that's not a problem at all, the problem is that it lacks subtlety, and this is a completely fixable issue.

For starters I wouldn't do a complete stanza break before "of our hollow wedding vows". You might as well get a crayon and underline it twice to make sure everyone reads it. The way a twist should work is first it must feel right. It can't just surprise us, you can surprise people easily, just do something really weird right? Do something macabre, easy easy. No, it must feel right. A good "twist" or climax is one which is exciting and impactful and yet still feels right, and one that doesn't require lots of underlining to be strong is the best, and it's true your poem just puts so much focus on that one line that its delivery and build up feels like must be perfect.

Back to the tangent of twists, twists are perfectly fine they don't have to be gimmicky but in order for an A to B twist to work there must be an organic link, and what this means is something you'd find in say a Sonnet or Villanelle. For a sonnet, the 9th line is meant to show a different perspective that doesn't discredit the first 8, but rather shows a different perspective that works IN CONJUNCTION with those earlier lines to show a new perspective. With the villanelle each repetition of a good vilanelle is meant to shine new potential to that configuration of words by introducing more perspective. Right now your poem is such that the climax doesn't work because it doesn't offer anything new and therefore impactful. We basically know what it's about before the reveal, especially as it's a pretty common comparison, and the end doesn't give us anything.

And making it vague won't work either, because all it would mean is we go ???? wat oh. I see okay.

So in practical terms what you need is that the early parts must stand on their own, and then the climax must add additional meaning and perspective. Right now, we KNOW reading the early bits that it's a metaphor for something, even if we don't know what it's for we know it's something and we're basically hurrying through the lines to have you tell us what. That's not how you want people to read your poems. What you need is that the early lines must have substance on their own that can carry themselves, and we read this with a feeling about these growing icicles? or whatever (feel like you'd have to change a lot if not all of the imagery to make this work), we must read this and we must be able to visualize both content and emotion, so no just being able to visualize icicles as perfect weapons is no use to us if we don't know what is being murdered because now we basically know this is a game of "what's being murdered? is it a) love? b) childhood innocence? c) FREEDOM? d) an actual living organism? Of course some poems do just use this kind of answer begging format but in my eyes it's just so simple and blatant it has to be technically and fantastic and amazing to be of worth you literally have to carry the poem via amazing literary skills alone which always feels like it's making it difficult for no reason.

Okay I don't want to be all vague so I want to give some examples (forgive if they are bad this is impromtu of course just trying to illustrate) So examples of how to do this: You have suburban imagery possible here, draw into that. How does suburban life relate to marriage and relationships? So as an example to make this twist work you can write a suburban scene of individuals, live and tangible, dealing with this threat or fear of murder or aftermath of murder, and as I said these must be things we can visualize and have substance. These characters or images of people and emotions seem to be people dealing with unwarranted? fear, and reeks of isolation? ego and id? reputation? their masks? their lies? their being sick of those lies but needing them anyway? Darla

prepares for the neighbourhood watch: red lipstick, mask
ara-- silhouette at the door, ready to kill with
James in the
dirty t-shirt he won't change.
20 minutes of arguments, 40 minutes smiles, then
20 more.


This is obviously a very prose and modern take on poetry that's not the same as your style but I hope you see what I mean, you need to create something that means something on it's own that gets added meaning when you sink it all in so they can go, wow. If you make it obvious, if all you write only has meaning after the extra key, if they knew it needed a key from the beginning, they will just flit right through it.

So in quickly drafted example, you have painted a picture that stands alone as a scenario with its own emotion, in a way we're fooled into thinking there's a real murder even though we know it's about more than the murder, then we can continue in this vein and expose the problems in this relationship and turn it back and show that this murder the title of the poem refers not to this thing that might not even be a murder (we might not ever specify it as murder maybe it was just robbery or other crimes right?), instead we realize that the murder refers to something that's been under our nose all along, and yet has been tantalizing and really feeling the whole way through, this murder of marriage vows, this dissolution of love, and promises, and not only that, we get to show this murder of holy wedding vows in more than just words (because that's ultimately a lot of telling) we get to SHOW them the dissolution while it is disguised as "plot device" for the "murder", but then this vehicle for the point turns out to be the point itself, and it reaches a moment where we have a satisfactory end that makes sense and the reader has been cognizant of throughout while still being now 100% clear.

I'll admit my example is a bit cliche as well, but you can kind of see how that allows us to basically show and sprinkle our literary magic to really milk the emotions and tableus that come from a dying/dead marriage while still retaining a "twist".

Okay technical edits:

Starting with the showpiece:

of our hollow wedding vows.

I'd nix the our. You don't need to specify "our". It just makes it clunky. It's heavy handed as it is. In general if a word doesn't contribute meaning, it must contribute flow or emotion. And in this case "our" doesn't really do anything on both counts (you can argue it, but I disagree and think it's obviously so).

The suspect
had been spotted
around the neighborhood in the past
coming for others,
but it was our season now.

I feel like a lot of the enjambment here doesn't make sense. I neither understand why you want to end lines where you do, nor why you choose to start lines with those words, and generally your reason to break a line has to be either because you want to create a visual pause, or to put emphasis on a new word.

If anything it should go like this:

The suspect had been
spotted around the neighborhood, had been
in the past, coming for others,
but it was our season now.

or just

The suspect had been spotted
around the neighborhood in the past,
coming for others,
but it was our season now.

Okay my edits aren't good, and I have a very different stylistic preference from you, but what I mean to show is that line breaks should be more sparse or when it's used it should be more pointed. If you're not going to use it to jarr, then you should just avoid them in general and just go for punctuation ends:

The suspect had been spotted around the neighborhood,
in the past, coming for others,
but it was our season now.

Like there's 100% nothing wrong with putting it like this. There doesn't have to be this idea that poetry has to be choppy. Choppiness is stylization, stylization for the sake of itself is artifice, and it will be read as such. On another tangent I feel like lots of people writing poems go into it thinking poems must look or be a certain way or has an idea in their head and go for the aesthetic instead of allowing a way for your meaning and imagery and emotions to breathe out best.

I notice that these edits in general just seems like I hate line breaks but I really love them (too much) I just feel like they must have a specific reason for existing, and they should be there when a linebreak is what you need, not looking to fit them somewhere because you feel like a certain number of them is good, or because you want the length of the lines to be equal or something (well for the most part, I think visual shape of a poem can be relevant, but it's secondary I think, 95% of the time if a poem needs a run-on sentence the good line break spots will show themselves).

Anyway, as you can see I feel like there's some fundamental problems in this poem holding it back, and I feel like the imagery therefore doesn't work simply because of those reasons, and probably you're sick of me trying to pretend I know what's what, so I leave it here.

As I said in my last critique, this seems to be a bit more detailed than most comments offered here, I hope you understand that no malice is intended, and it's up to you to accept or ignore it, but if you wish I'm happy to explain anything I've said poorly.

[ChristopherSea]

Klis, much obliged for the detailed analysis, critique and the sharing of your philosophy on crafting poetry. I enjoyed your little ditty about Darla and James as well. I understand your point about writing a poem that stands on its own with or without a concluding plot twist. However, I feel this poem stands up without the last strophe already. Nonetheless, I will certainly give it another run through. From your quotes, it does look like you had read/commented on one of the earlier edits. Agreed, I don’t have to drop the final line to stand alone. As part of the final stanza it may be more of a surprise, as you suggest. I was thinking more about pause and emphasis. I will consider the alternative as I am close to putting this poem down for a while. Thanks again./Chris