Ice Cream Night (Tear it apart!)

[silentseas]

ice cream night:
serve me all
your cloyed alms

but your diamonds
on the tongue
don’t taste good

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Hi all, I'm pretty new to the site so thank you for taking a look at this poem I wrote. I need to edit this for a class I'm taking and any comments - no matter how harsh - are deeply appreciated! Thanks again.

[ellajam]

Hi, SS, I have a few issues with this. First, the sonics: for me  "cloyed alms" is awkward and unpleasant to say. I'd prefer "the diamonds on your tongue" and the last line is just flat and uninteresting.

Here's my real problem: Ice cream=Sweet, luscious, a treat. Cloyed alms=overly, maybe falsely sweet charity or gift. I can see your point but I don't get why you would label what you're getting as something so pleasant, seems more like cotton candy.

Diamonds:=Hard, sharp but beautiful. How that links back to ice cream eludes me and diamond on the tongue brings to mind pithy, bright, insightful words. I don't think that's what you have in mind.

Good luck with it.

ice cream night:
serve me all
your cloyed alms

but your diamonds
on the tongue
don’t taste good

[Tiger the Lion]

Hello Silent. A few thoughts for you...

ice cream night: if this is the title, I would suggest "serve me..." as line 1. 
serve me all
your cloyed alms

but your diamonds how are diamonds related back to ice cream or alms?
on the tongue 
don’t taste good this falls flat. There's not enough connection between V1 and V2 for an effective "punchline"

--
Hi all, I'm pretty new to the site so thank you for taking a look at this poem I wrote. I need to edit this for a class I'm taking and any comments - no matter how harsh - are deeply appreciated! Thanks again.

Good luck with your class.

[Knot]

Hi silentsea

I'm afraid I'm with ellajam and Tiger the Lion on this.

Ice Cream Night implies some form of treat/pleasure
(unless you're lactose intolerant, I suppose),
so why this would be 'charitable' is lost on me,
as is the transition from 'alms' to 'diamonds'.
I don't think, with two verses, you given yourself
enough space to successfully articulate your idea.

ice cream night:
serve me all
your cloyed alms
did you mean 'cloying' or 'clotted' ?

but your diamonds
on the tongue
don’t taste good
maybe;
'Aren't half as sweet    ?

Not so much the voice of experience, but something of a lesson learned,
over writing and editing down is so much easier than the other way round.
Start with Tiger the Lion's suggestion for the first line and see what happens.


Best, Knot.

[shemthepenman]

hello,
i’m writing this on my phone so i apologies for lack of formatting. 

ice cream night: you don’t need this in the poem. it’s already the title. 
serve me all
your cloyed alms—it seems like you are using cloyed as an adjective. it isn’t an adjective. but if you are using it as the past tense of cloy it makes just as little sense. maybe stick to cloying. plus, i can’t really make head nor tail of what you mean, regardless.

but your diamonds—i don’t know why you’ve started this with a “but”. 
on the tongue
don’t taste good—i don’t know about this last line. like spinal tap once said “there’s a fine line between clever and stupid”.

so, i don’t think you have much of a poem here—something about ice cream; and, it seems like you’ve made a grammatical error using “cloyed” within the first few lines, so the reader doesn’t have much confidence moving forward. as such, there may be something profound here, but i wouldn’t know because i’m not going to spend much time trying to decipher the meaning of a poem that can’t tell it’s verb from its adjective. 
i’d bin it and start again.

[rose]

Hi,
I agree with the other critic. It seems as though the ice cream night represents some larger theme you are trying to convey. Maybe step away from the poem and try to think of what you want to express. Then add some more concrete sences from life to make the people less abstract. For instance, if you choose to talk about an ice cream social as the title implies you are, connect back to the ice cream and people more and relate them to the ideas you with to convey.
Good luck!

[ClaireLou]

Hi

I'm afraid I'm not 100% sure as to what you are trying to get across to the reader here.  Maybe you could look into extending it so that it has more direction as at the moment I don't believe it conveys enough:

ice cream night:
serve me all
your cloyed alms  (Is this relating to the Ice Cream being too thick & heavy, not soft & light like anticipated, meaning that the goals experienced on that evening are overly sweet & sickening?)

but your diamonds
on the tongue
don’t taste good (Do the Diamonds represent how pure the night should be, with clarity, but going back to the verse above, it isn't due to the extensive sweetness with the air not tasting good on the tongue?)

[ADUnser]

I'm intrigued by the direction of this poem but perhaps you could expand on it a little. As of right now I'm not really sure what you're trying to say. I'm sure you are using ice cream as a metaphor for something significant to you, but I need more as a reader to understand what that is. Overall though I think you have a good starting point here and with some more thought you could create a really unique poem.

[AttnAttack]

ice cream night:  // you're invoking an image/place/time in the readers mind here.  I enjoy this.  Short, simple language.
serve me all
your cloyed alms  // sickly sweet charity.  very evocative.

// this first stanza has a hidden meaning.  the literal is that at nice cream night, the speaker is served overly sweet, somewhat disgustingly so.  metaphorical, to me it means a sort of repentence period between lovers: ice cream night is when they're trying to woo you back after doing something wrong.  the stanza is short and vague enough that one can get lots of images here.  try and be a little bit more specific; a definition of who "you" is would do wonders for the poem; you can use the subject of who "you" is within the title without changing the poem at all.

but your diamonds
on the tongue
don’t taste good


// you broke your own imposed structure here.  'but your diamonds' is 4 syllables when every other line is 3.   Suggest fixing that.  Find a better way to say "don't taste good' and you'll have made a much better poem.

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Hi all, I'm pretty new to the site so thank you for taking a look at this poem I wrote. I need to edit this for a class I'm taking and any comments - no matter how harsh - are deeply appreciated! Thanks again.

[moot]

ice cream night:        *I liked this line. I thought it conveyed some imagery that could be expanded upon*
serve me all              *Perhaps simile could be used here*
your cloyed alm        *I thought this line distracted from the work*

but your diamonds    * Good use of imagery*
on the tongue            *This could use a little more work, it is direct. Unlike the previous lines which include imagery, I found it distracting*
don’t taste good         *This ends a little abruptly, as with the line above, there is no imagery or simile used*  

I like this work. It has a promising start and could present some nice visual elements. I thought there needed to be more use of imagery and simile. There are areas that could be further expanded upon to make this piece flow better.

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Hi all, I'm pretty new to the site so thank you for taking a look at this poem I wrote. I need to edit this for a class I'm taking and any comments - no matter how harsh - are deeply appreciated! Thanks again.

[crow]

Silentseas,

Late to the party here, and I can’t figure out what the other critiquers are talking about. You’ve seated tragedy in ice cream, and that’s a fine notion. No one else is linking diamonds and alms? Ice cream night, I’m assuming, is a once-weekly event in a shelter? Maybe a juvenile detention? I think the issue with the work is, delete “but”.

Ice Cream Night

ice cream night:
serve me all
your cloyed alms

but your diamonds
on the tongue
don’t taste good

[Writerbyfire]

ice cream night:
serve me all
your cloyed alms

but your diamonds      // I'm kind of underwhelmed by the transitional use of "but." it's the one word that seems really out of place
on the tongue                 at such an important transition
don’t taste good

--
Hi all, I'm pretty new to the site so thank you for taking a look at this poem I wrote. I need to edit this for a class I'm taking and any comments - no matter how harsh - are deeply appreciated! Thanks again.

I absolutely love the imagery in the first stanza. It really seemed like cloyed alms was reaching the edge of over bloated language but the more I read the more I felt it was right. If it was a longer poem it'd probably be too much but here it works after a few re readings. 

When I first read the second stanza the thing I thought of was a tongue piercing which turned the Ice cream night into a date which added the first real context to the poem but then I sort of got stuck on that and couldn't get other contexts. With it being so sort there's very little clues to go off of which make whats there so quintessentially important (i.e. not one wasted word) Further reading connects charity with diamonds but see I'm still thinking about marriage now. 

Is there significance to there being no punctuation other than the colon after night. If not then punctuation could grant more clues to the meanings of the poem.

[zwubz]

Hi Silent,

I like this short but sweet piece  

ice cream night:
serve me all
your cloyed alms

but your diamonds (I agree that the use of "But" here does break the flow of the piece)
on the tongue
don’t taste good

The imagery I got upon reading was that of someone with a bit of a Masochistic personality of enjoying the gluttony of sweetness and over indulgence while not deriving pleasure of what I'm assuming would be a much traditionally pleasant experience. 

[Dwestmoreland]

Hi, 

I am new as well.
I too was confused by your use of the colon as I thought it was a title before I realized that there were three lines in the second stanza and therefore it was probably meant to be inculded

[wesliewilkin]

ice cream night:
serve me all
your cloyed alms - please change this! "cloyed alms" just seems weird

but your diamonds
on the tongue
don’t taste good 

I'm sorry, this doesn't make much sense   

[michellewareham]

[quote="silentseas" pid='234770' dateline='1508158894']
ice cream night:
serve me all
your cloyed alms << you could take your metaphor further hear as 'your cloyed alms' is awkward... maybe she is some sort of ice cream thing like 'your clotted cream arms'... for example.

but your diamonds << sharp kissing?
on the tongue
don’t taste good << punctuation?