Writing Two poems.

[Bio]

[font=georgia]In my bid to return to these boards with a vengeance, I'm posting some poems (which I haven't done for years).

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[COLOR=DarkGreen]And so I have the great honour of being first to reply to this.
The first one was fun to read. It's got that subtle flavour, where it seems like it took no effort at all to put in so much talent. I have to say it wasn't NEARLY as good as the second, but I'll get to that.
I have a bad habit of merely praising someone's work, rather than nit-picking for the sake of helping them get better. So I'll try to avoid that.

Maybe it's just that I'm so used to my style of writing, but the first one, yes, seemed too short. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it. But at the end, I was thinking 'Is that all?'
It just seems like it's set up to be much longer.

Now the SECOND one.

[/COLOR][FONT=georgia][/FONT][COLOR=DarkGreen][QUOTE] He smiled again, that threadbare cat of pain
And spoke aloud the curse that was my name[/QUOTE]

That part got me. At first, I had little interest. And I got to that part... and I had to read the whole thing over again.

[QUOTE] My ink-stained hands did tremble as they wrote
The words that clasped my hands around my throat...[/QUOTE]

Those are just my favourite lines, mind you. Captivating, sinister. The whole thing reads like Poe. No doubt you've been reading him. Poe's always in style.

Howeverrrr... yes, however.
It was long. Which makes it more of an interesting read, if you have the attention span. Which I don't, so I had to read it a few times.

So on a scale of one to ten for the first poem: 6.

The second: 9.

I hope I was of at least a LITTLE help. If nothing else, I can tell you that I enjoyed them. ;]
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[Lady Asphyxia]

[FONT=Arial][SIZE=2]IIiiii...have to make a confession. My attention span is tiny and poetry makes my eyes cross. [Partly because I get eye strain from reading vast amounts of things on the computer]. So I didn't read the second poem fully, I'm afraid. From what I did read, I could see that it was much better than the first poem, in terms of consistance, style and rhyme, and so I figured I'd turn my attention to the first poem instead.

I love the first stanza. The opening line is fantastic, powerful and, well, [I]awesome[/I]. My only nitpick is the 4th line, and it's just because on first read I felt the rhyme was too obvious. When I read it aloud, though, it does still work, so it's not really necessary to change it.

The second stanza is the weak link for me. All the others have five lines and a subtle rhyming pattern -- this one is four lines long and is basically an aabb pattern, which just sort of pulls you out of the poem. I'd strongly advise you to either revise the entire stanza or pull it completely.

The third and fourth stanzas are fantastic, although the 2nd line of the fourth stanza doesn't quite fit. The rest of it, though, is good, and I'm impressed that there's such a talented poet in OB's midst.[/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=Arial][/FONT]