r/poetry_critics

Do men and women actually as a rule prefer different things in a book. Having grown up on the Russian Masters I have never found a woman who wrote to the quality I found there. It may be the female brain works differently towards familial connections, personal tragedy and emotional intelligence. While the best of male writers push for plot and intrigue and prose craft and characters that shoot from the page.

You left so quietly the house still mistakes shadows for you.

Some nights, I hear the floorboards breathe and think grief has finally learned your footsteps.

I loved you in the cathedral hush between midnight and mourning, where candles drown slowly in their own wax like saints abandoned by God.

And still—

even now—

I keep your name folded beneath my tongue like a funeral prayer too sacred to speak aloud.

What a terrible thing, to be loved long after becoming absent.

You disappeared without goodbye, yet my heart remains kneeling at the altar of your silence, bleeding roses into its hands.

I think that is the cruelest part:

you left, and all the dying stayed with me.

I made you the hero 
of all the stories I tell. 
Put you on a pedestal so high,
I would have to fly to get you down. 
I've been told to lower you,
So I can see you for who you really are. 

I never understood what they meant,
I do see you for who you are,
soaring the skies, capturing the stars, and 
giving light to my world,
You are my hero.
I've been drowning in dread 
and despair. 

You came down, held my hand, and swam with me to the shore. 
I feel pity for them 
because they don't truly see you. 

Nail down

Icarus. Fly

and reach, but phantasm

always drown in rich devouring flames.

Settle.

Heed my

call imbecile. Let your self fade

with each stale breath, for men

are weak. Made to

wither.

"Old man."

With scorched skin

he spoke. "tasting the sun,

tumbling towards fated impact."

"I'll smile."

---

Been writing a few months now. Wrote this a while back! What do you think?

I don't remember
when living became so heavy.

I just know
I wake up every morning
with the heaviest pit in my stomach,
like it belongs there,
like my body has learned to carry despair
more naturally than peace.

I look at myself
and I feel unfamiliar.

Some nights I lie awake,
wondering what it would be like
to never exist at all,
to not carry a mind that turns against me
with each passing day.

I never understand
why I couldn't have been different,
why I was born with a mind
that's too heavy to maintain,
and a heart that feels worn out.

Everything around me feels artificial.
And somewhere along the way,
I stopped feeling human too.

And so I turn

A choice, him or me
Revolver in my trembling hand
On this shallow poem we stand
He looks at me with a silent plea
A society that is eat or get eaten
Shoot or declare yourself beaten
In this fleeting moment I wonder
What is his worth compared to mine
Does he have a lover to entwine
Will his death make his family sunder
My brain tells me to pull the trigger
It’s too late to run
In the end I realize I’m out of vigor
And so I turn the gun

Idk if you’re allowed to add text to your poem but I don’t really care about anything anymore. This poem is just a blurb I made when I was in a dark spot, so it’s probably very shit but oh well maybe I can improve with some feedback, if someone will even see this.

my daughter wrote this slam poem for an upcoming school competition. she has never written slam before , she is a complete beginner, and we were wondering on what she was doing right and wrong? thank you. here is the poem:

What lurks in the back of our heads
Is the things that people said
their words are piercing
Sitting at the bottom of our stomach 
like uncooked meat
Unable to digest their opinions
So we are left
With this sickening feeling
That keeps appearing
A little voice everyday
That tells us to hate , gnaws away
Bit by bit consuming your your mind
Until you truly believe it.

Until the words that you are ugly
That you need to be pretty, need to be more
Have seeped into your every pore
And the belief you aren’t enough
Becomes one  that you can’t ignore.

And people don’t like the dark
They don’t like what they don’t know at core
It has always been like this, 
We have suffered this way before.

Society profits of us wanting to change
To poke , brush , prod and paint ourself
In to a version that isn’t us
A replica of the girl on the magazine
Who has also suffered  like this
Who is also broken at the seams

The stuff we buy 
To change us
Will never be enough
So they sell us another product
This system is corrupt.

Is it really that rebellious to love oneself?
They call us ugly 
To sell us something that will change us
Re-arrange us
But I’ve had enough of this same old game.

I refuse to apologize
For the bags under my eyes
And the hair on my legs

For the frizz in my hair

I refuse to apologize
For the pimples on my nose
the lumps in my ponytail
And the clothes
That i wear

I will not compromise myself 
If society doesn’t like my face
Then society can suffer.
I will not re-mold myself in to another version

I was born as myself
And as myself i will die
I will not compromise.

 So,
I refuse to apologize.
And i hope you do too
This is the start of a journey
But if we love ourselves then we cannot lose.

She fell asleep in my arms, in my sweater, at her house 

And the fires on, that I didn’t start, but somehow she knew how 

And I’m back to writing poems that remind me of ourselves 

And the fires dying down but I was supposed to leave at twelve 

Just sometime in the summertime I remember your mine 

I don’t want to be a reflection where you say “I miss that time”

Because you’re my future, I love you forever, you’ll always be mine.

Lilies

Of course I’ll buy you flowers
Wrapped in plastic
With the string tied

Not because I’m meant to
Says the gurus
In the ink typed

Not to make you stay
Though I hope I’ll always hold you
And your grip stays forever tight

Don’t see it as repayment
For coming to my darkness
To show me there’s a thin light

Or leading me to the shore
When I couldn’t see
The near tide

But because I hope you’ll smile
Not for me but deep inside
Where, in that moment, you’re free

My love can’t be weighed in petals
When leaves decay with time
So lilies hold no power

But if they guaranteed a smile
Every day
I’d shop for flowers

Distance.

A week, a month, a year

Every time I hear from you, I shed a tear

At the end of the night, I just wish you were here

Because of my past. I know you fear

My intentions weren't always clear

I'm a new me, and I promise I care.

THE IDEA OF YOU

Roses are red, violets are blue
I will always love the idea of you

But what you did, I cannot forgive
I gave you all I could give
All you left were bruises under my skin

You bent my thoughts till nothing felt true
You held my truth like something to steal
You blurred the line between false and true
You were once gold, but the paint wore through
All that’s left is black and blue

You would take and take like I had more to give
You even took my will to live
But somehow, still, I did forgive

You bit down hard till I turned black and blue

But somehow, I still forgive
So you stay free of guilt

Roses are red, violets are blue
I’ll always love the idea of you
But I cannot forgive you for what you did

Let me kneel at the altar of your personage,
feel the presence of your beauty, know the power of your cruelty.
Let my lungs fill with terror projected toward the heavens, that falls in beams of love through colored pane.
Let me weep softly o'er intricate patterned stone,
that mingles in the shadows, that chills me to the bone.
Let me kneel at the altar of your personage,
wait for your light alone, and if light I shall not see, I'll leave my heart upon this stone.

Having read a few poems by the latest winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize for under 39s, it seems that anyone can be a poet. Just write a list of your thoughts or what you did or is in your apartment and there you go, a prize winner! No kintsugi just nonsense dressed up..

Sex

Sex is the strangest, cruelest thing God ever made.

Some people crave it like air. Some sip it once a week.Some never touch it again.I drown everyone who gets close, then try to drown myself. Since I was nine the darkness has lived in me. Depression wrapped its hands around my throat while porn lit a fire in my small body trembling hands stroking raw in the dark, chasing something I couldn’t finish, just burning and burning. I stood on the edge of a bridge,

wind whipping my face, hoping I would lose my balance and finally fall. I pressed knives against my skin, felt the cold edge, too scared to cut,

Too scared to live.

At ten they dragged me behind the wall.

A girl forced my dick into her mouth.I cried silently while my body learned it could be used.

At thirteen I had sex. She was warm and alive around me. That same night she killed herself. I carried her silence like another blade against my wrist.

Two years ago a man locked my girlfriend in the bathroom.

He groped her, forced his dick into her mouth.

She told me everything. I held her while she shook. I swore I would never be that man.

Tonight she looked at me with the trust she was still trying to rebuild. She whispered stop. Soft. Scared. Breaking.I heard her. I felt her body freeze the same way it froze in that bathroom.

And for ten unforgivable seconds

I kept going...moving inside her, chasing the same old fire, raping the one person who still loved me after everything she had already survived. When she shoved me off, the room died.

I collapsed and cried like something being torn apart from the inside. Great heaving sobs that ripped my chest open until I vomited everything

hot, sour, choking, kneeling in my own mess, shaking like that nine-year-old boy again.

The same boy who stood on bridges.

The same boy who held knives to his skin.

The same hands that just became the monster I swore I would never be.

I looked at her face

the fear, the betrayal, the love I murdered

and my heart finally broke the way it should have broken every single time I wanted to die. I don’t know how I could do this to her. After everything she survived, I became the next man who hurt her. I am the monster I feared I would become. The depression never left. The suicidal thoughts never left. They just waited for me to prove that I really don’t deserve to be here.

I don’t want forgiveness.

I don’t want tomorrow.

I just want the courage

to finally let go of the bridge railing

or press the knife hard enough this time.

Because I hurt the only person

who made me want to stay alive.

Hi, I made my first ever poem today, please let me know you think!

~

I like to watch rivers flow;
on the side it wanders right-to-left.
For the reflections are like time passing;
constant, partly clear and unmet.

Each streamline paints a different picture;
soft strokes of water that never end.
For change works in similar ways;
unpredictable, inevitable and always there.

Hear the locals intertwining, and birds reuniting
Hear the trees whisper sayings in the air.
For in a world so chaotic; an environment so erratic,
The noises in reflections go bare.

~

They say
if you love somebody
you let them go.

As if happiness needs distance
from the ones you love.

Have you ever had children?

Would you let them go?

And I don’t mean
let them grow up.

Let them become someone.

Let them find love itself.

I mean could you teach your heart at its core
to stop reaching for them,
so they could smile without you.

No.

That’s not how love works.

Love does not practice goodbye
until it numbs into resignation.

Love keeps vigil.

Love stands guard.

Love bleeds.

And maybe that is its paroxysm.

Everything I feel is at the tip of my tongue
Ready to come out
But I can only play you the songs
From all the playlists you inspire

Because I can’t say what I want to say

My cheeks ache from all the laughter you cause
I lie awake thinking
What if every day and night could be like this
And what would we be if you ever found out

Because we’re friends, and I’m already too far in

I smile when you smile
When I passed you the card
Did we linger for a little while
Treading the line,
I’m secretly hoping for a sign

I live in the clouds
Your feet are on earth
You’re leaving soon and you’ll say goodbye
Yet I make plans with you in my mind

Because I want you closer even though I know you need to go

The world feels a little brighter
Then you enter the frame
The brightness fades into the background
And suddenly I’m searching for everything

Because I wasn’t supposed to feel like this so soon
And because I thought I already knew love’s tune

I'll straighten out the collar of your shirt while we talk

Will you then know the love I hold for you

I might put my head on your shoulder

And yours slowly shifting on top of mine

Your hand will hold my waist

In that moment I'd swirl with emotions

In the concave of love

Both sure of eachother

As if time waited for them

The wind shy

The sky in awe

Guys don't just read and go tell me what it made you feel and give feedbacks or atleast an upvote so the post can reach others too

this is a poem
it has 2 stanzas
this is one
i cant think of a rhyme scheme
so i will include none

this is a poem
that looks much better in a trashcan
because every time that i write
nobody seems to understand