[Yep, I'm back again. :)]

I liked the stanza
"The slowly flowing river
Which shone in the light
The newly fallen rain
That reflects so bright".
It added a nice touch of imagery to the piece and helped me imagine the "home" that the narrator wants to get away from. I also liked the way that you connected the death of your grandfather to the need to get away. It shows how the death of a loved one has a deep impact on your life and can leave you wondering where you are.

I did spot a few mistakes. In the line "I have to free" I think you meant "I have to be free." Also, with the line "Take it no more," I think you probably did it on purpose, but it should be "Take it any more." That would also sound better.

It's not a mistake, but with "That reflects so bright," I think replacing it with "That shines so bright" would make this piece flow more smoothly.

The thing that bothers me about this piece is the inconsistent rhyming. It sort of throws the rhythm off and makes the poem sound... I don't know, patchy? It just didn't appeal to me. On the other hand, I did like the fact that you didn't use any punctuation. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but luckily, this case was the former. It makes the poem flow well and maintain a steady stream of thoughts.

This was a very sad piece. I would have found it very moving, were it not for my extremely picky nature. There were many stylistic hiccups I noticed in your writing:

You used a conjunction (usually 'and', sometimes 'or') in nearly every sentence describing the three friends. Perhaps this was intentional but I felt it made the writing feel repetitive. Varying the sentence structure should make the piece easier to read.

"He wouldn’t have been taken away from his family and saved." - This sentence seems awkward. It took me a moment to figure out what you were trying to say, and the words 'and saved' don't flow well. There were other sentences that didn't flow well either.

You started a couple of sentences with conjunctions, which is generally a no-no, as tempting as it may be.

With all of these little things stacking together the writing felt jumbled and I had difficulty really getting into it. I hope you'll forgive me for being such a harsh critic - while I nitpicked at the way you wrote, I really did like what you had to say. Anyway, the more you write, the better you get, so there's no problems there. Keep at it!

Hm, well I saw potential in the writing itself but this piece didn't really do it for me. I found that the rhyming was a nice touch but you didn't use it to it's full advantage. You could've done a big more with it and also at times you were off rhythm. Some of these lines felt cliche as well. Not in the sense of overdone but it they just seemed expected. The only part I would suggest you fix is the first two lines. The whole piece follows the rhyme scheme of:
aa
bb

except for those lines. Were they supposed to rhyme? Other than that, nicely done.

I liked the feeling of yearning and loss from the MC here, and the contrast with the care-free though not un-sympathetic creatures in the woods. Some lovely descriptions, too.

The pace i found a little unbalanced: slow and drawn out in the begining but rather rushed at the end. I think you could have used another para to make then ending seem less rushed. Also, there was a character i didn't notice before that got introduced at the last minute: the human friend/s in the woods. it left me wondering when the story i felt should have been tieing together loose ends and finishing up, not creating new ones :)

There also seemed to be a tense change somewhere (i'm pretty crap with verb tenses) but at teh beginning it was present tense and at teh end 'she reached out and touched it' etc seemed past tense. The only other CC i'd make is for a few more commas, eg:


"one you would pass through as you were entering a prison or worse that of hell."

it works very nicely as a one-shot, but equally i think it could work as the start of somethng larger, with that tension set up between her friends in the woods and her life at court. nice job!

This is a beautiful piece of prose. The pain and emotion is evident in the narration and you pull it off so well. It doesn't sound forced or awkward or anything--it just sounds completely. An honest, natural, depressing confession.

The last lines were absolutely beautiful, and I felt it rounded up the story perfectly.

I found a small mistake: I don’t know you are, what you are. There's a missing "who" or "what" in that sentence.

Otherwise, kudos. I really enjoyed this story. :]

I like this, it ind of seems to go through innocence then darker times with the bunnies and the shadowy muse, it shows how the mind matures, grows, changes completely and then tries to recapture the innocence of a child but ends up with a (as you put it) "buse" I really like the layout, each verse is showing a stage and i love the way in the end the power was your own, (the speaker's) it gives the feel of real control over one's own life after everything seems lost.

I really liked all the imagery going on here. You described so much and with graphic metaphors but in a subtle way. I liked the tone that you took with this also. Almost like a whispered secret or a quiet song. Also, I liked the way that you fragmented the sentences and formatted the piece in general. It created a choppy kind of flow but it fit the piece. Nicely done.

I liked the first stanza a lot. The imagery was very interesting: dark, but presented in a simple, unique way. I also liked the last line quite a bit. It felt insightful.
I did not like the flow of this poem much. The second and fourth stanzas especially felt a bit awkward when I read them.

~RM

\Congrats on getting 50 chapters for this, I remember when there was only 13!

I have to admit that it’s hard for me to review song formatting pieces, simply because I never do it, but I’ll try me best.

I liked all of the intricate images that you present of this character/subject. The cutting and cigarettes, although they’re a bit cliched they do form strong images that act as pillars of someone’s personality. Everyone has a mental image of someone who is so far gone they can’t see themselves clearly any more, and when I read this, you brought out mine.

I didn’t like how the piece was devoid of metaphor, and just unbroken lyric. It was hard for me to slow down and see the words as pictures in my mind. I know I mentioned the above images, but the rest of the piece felt very different. It was hard for me to strongly hold the narration in my head. I enjoyed the piece overall though. Keep up the good work, and keep posting.

Much love,
Juliet.

Brilliant piece. I love your emotion filled works. :)

The thing I liked most about this poem was the fluidity of it, it doesn't seem like something you had trouble with, or had to sit and think about what to rhyme for twenty minutes before writing something--it just all seemed to flow from you, so the syntax of the poem works well and your use of metaphors for the ice skates on skin made me cringe, which might be the intention. I have a character in one of my stories who cuts, and so I liked the way that this speaker tries to justify what they're doing by saying "there's a kind of beauty/in it, isn't there?" I feel like my character does that too--they both try to make it justifiable to others.

What I disliked about it was sort of the expected cliches, I think you embraced them a little too much, the poem was what I expected to be--chilling, and depressed, full of emotion. I would have liked to see you take maybe a more less-cliche route to the prompt of cutting and the "twenty lines" or perhaps seen a little more desperation in the speaker to convince the reader that what they're doing is okay. Of course, I write and read a lot more poetry slam type poems, and not so much ones that are structured, so I think my dislike is more a matter of my tastes than it is anything that's really wrong.

Despite my dislike for its somewhat clicheness, I found the metaphors new and liked the ice skating analogy the best!

The poem seems to bring you back again after a journey into another world by having the first stanza and the last stanza the same. They are my fav two lines anyway. lol.

Anyway, I think that it could help to reduce the repetition. It's not that it's bad to have them, it's actually very good... But if you have too much repetition, they will seem boring and certain repeated lines won't stand out, like the first and last stanza. If you hadn't repeated it so much, then it would have stood out more.

To have the "it grabs you" effect, you could try replacing some words in the repeated lines such that the meaning is the same, but the words are different.. You know... like paraphrasing/ rephrasing. You can just reorder the words as well.

Your poem seems to start droning after the fifth stanza because of all these repetition.

This poem creates a creepy image tough, I don't know if that's what you meant, but I like the darkness that surrounds this poem... Keep writing.

~Ger.

I liked how this felt like song lyrics; I don’t know if meant it to be on the lyrical end, rather then on the poetry/prose, but I got a very strong since of that throughout. The narration felt loose enough that you could sing it. You mention things like being on a hilltop and other little details that I didn’t quite understand how they fit into the general idea of the piece. They seemed like stand alone thoughts as opposed to contributing to the greater whole of the piece.

I found your use of ‘cos’ a little distracting. I’m assuming you are lessening ‘because’ and in that situation ‘cause’ would be more grammatically correct. It was probably because you used it often, but the way you have it, I found it a bit distracting. Keep up the good work.

Much love,
Juliet.

This was truly amazing. I mean it I really loved this poem, I feel exactly the same all the time. I espesially liked "loving and killing in one breath" its a beautiful sentence. Thank you for this great read :]