Young Writers Society

time dropped like
the echo of a leaking faucet.

I caught it in between my teeth and chewed
at it like an idea,
a philosophy,
a year and a half left before I leave,
just another thought to wedge between
my two wisdom teeth.

I’ve been waiting for them to break through my gums
for three years,
like a newborn child, like a toddler,
gnawing at my skin to get the pain away.

there is hope, in time.

sundials spin like glass days and
the shadows on them change over the years;
an oak grew foot by foot by yard
and now it swallows up the hours like water.

this will past faster than I think.

I am so broken, sometimes,
so lost and caught in a sob when I say,
“I don’t know, I’m just SAD,”
but brokenness is only a contrast;
it is black now, black enough to blind,
but I’m sure, somewhere, it’s just my numb hands covering my eyes.

the sundials spin,
dance out from the shadows of tree limbs,
and the oak is spat out from its own mouth.
I chew on new teeth,
and swallow time like water.

Whee!- another pretty poem by Persy.
Gonna try to give a legitimate review here, so... here goes.

The weakest bit of this was the choice of line breaks. Thoughts leak between lines, enjambed and whatnot, so phrase-splitting is clearly intentional. However, the lines often seem broken almost arbitrarily, with less-than-perfect regard to sound and flow. As an example:

at it like an idea,

The line's starting with the hard, graceless "at" makes it kind of flop into the phrase, and flopping is always awkward. A rephrasing along the lines of "as though it were an idea" may be beneficial.
While the line breaks are disappointing, this is in part due to the lack of capitalization. It looks and feels very odd to see otherwise proper (poetic license-accounted) grammar with no capitalization save for the letter 'I.' If that too was not capitalized, then the lack of uppercase would not be so glaring. Subsequently (or if uppercase was there when expected) the line breaks would feel less awkward, be they still the same or no.

That said, a random (general) idea for improvement might be to vary the line lengths more: keep them fairly small and even with occasional bursts of varying, increased length. This would tie in neatly and simply with your theme of teething. (Is that picture from Pan's Labyrinth..?)

The last stanza was quite good. The first line callback with the sundials was nice (a pretty image, that), and then the imagery. Perfect match for the picture, and a reflection on teething simultaneously serious and utterly adorable, perhaps because I am imagining the picture-girl as the speaker.
So, er, naught else constructive can I think of at this time...

Keen piece, keep writing! =]

Persy! I love you, but I think that this isn't your best poem. Because you're such a goshdarn awesome writer, this means that this piece is okay, not horrible. Still...

I think one of the reasons why I don't like this is because it's not sure where it wants to go. In the middle (stanza 7) it randomly seems to whine. Which is kind of annoying to me, as a reader, because I was expecting some awesome time traveling things, and then it seems like that the whole time bit was just a platform to whine. I mean, whining isn't bad. Really. But, if you want to do so, you should probably integrate the idea of feeling SAD in the entire poem.

In fact, you can definitely do this in a pretty cool way, considering that you are using time as your kind of theme here. I don't know if you watch Mad Men, but here is this one cool scene that I think you'll enjoy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHUUyx0d7qw

See, what is happening is that Don Draper (the main guy who is giving the pitch) is having his life fall apart slowly. He's miserable. And so, when he makes this pitch, he goes back and forth on some of the happiest moments of his life in random order, and it kills you because you know that he is suffering so badly.

I don't know...

So, use this wisely. It's kind of a gimmick, yes, but it would be such a powerful gimmick and I know you can do so much with it, you awesome writer, you!

Have fun!

Persy,

That feeling when you know you have a good novel in your hands, and you sit back and read and enjoy, feet propped up on the coffee table? That is the feeling I get as I read through this, the words flow quite lovely and as a reader I feel comfortable enough with the voice.

I am so broken, sometimes,
so lost and caught in a sob when I say,
“I don’t know, I’m just SAD,”
but brokenness is only a contrast;
it is black now, black enough to blind,
but I’m sure, somewhere, it’s just my numb hands covering my eyes.

I think the above stanza is beautiful, I think it describes a moment quite well. Sometimes there's no better word for sad, then sad. BUT I do agree with Snoink, it seems to come out of no where, especially since the tone I've been getting before, was more of a speaker who is irritated, what with the teething, and the leaking faucet imagery. I even get a bitter-sweetness, but I do not get a sad or depressed tone up to that point, and the picture itself I don't think portrays sadness either.

Now for the more technical things, I don't like the double-usage of sun dials spinning. Besides the fact that they for the most part stand perfectly still, I just think that there should be a different word-choice there, because I think in each of the stanzas that it was used- there are different effects that are going on, and I don't see that you were trying to echo it back to the beginning, so *shrugs* say it once, say it right - or else say it differently, right? Offer a new perspective.

I love the usage here:

the sundials spin,
dance out from the shadows of tree limbs,
and the oak is spat out from its own mouth.

because, everything seems very Alice-and-wonderland: the perfect blend of whimsical, dream-like imagery with a tinge of dark themes & tones.

The previous usage:

sundials spin like glass days and
the shadows on them change over the years;

I like the "glass days" - I don't like the use of "shadows" because when I think of glass, I think of blurs not shadows (light typically goes through the glass, right?) and I don't like the use of "spin" because of reasons I just mentioned. Now these are just my opinion.

Another thing I caught:

this will past faster than I think.

Should be "pass"

Other than these little minor things (I really had to dig to find a flaw in this, by the way), I absolutely enjoyed it. Definitely provided an experience for me. If we still had the "like" feature, I would definitely "like" this piece.

Hope this helps,

~ as always, Audy