A Scar On My Heart

[DistortedMemory]

Strange, isn't it,
This emotion.
They call it love.
It's a deep scar.
A pain on the inside.
With only one cure.
When you can't get that cure,
You suffer alone.
My cure is lost.
And the pain remains.
The sun has set for me,
So that it can rise for another.

---

Free verse? I'm not entirely sure what to call the structure. No rhyming scheme or planning, written straight from the word go and then reworded slightly.

I want mainly opinions, I've never attempted poetry to be honest, I prefer writing short story fictions.
Yes I'm still a teenager and I have my angst, trying to be edgy with a poem about love, but it's just difficult to express without sounding generic.

[YesNo]

I thought what you wrote was clear and interesting. I liked the line "My cure is lost."

[DistortedMemory]

Thanks for the feedback :)

[Delta40]

I like your attempt at separating yourself from it in the lines:

Strange, isn't it,
This emotion.
They call it love.

It drew me in a little more as I felt a soul drowning but acting as if it did not care.

[DistortedMemory]

I like your attempt at separating yourself from it in the lines:

Strange, isn't it,
This emotion.
They call it love.

It drew me in a little more as I felt a soul drowning but acting as if it did not care.

That's what I tried to get across and I'm glad it worked :) Thanks

[Delta40]

lol. You did and perhaps reminded me the recoil of young love when it is hurt is universal....

[IceM]

I'm an amateur of perhaps similar age of you, so I understand the initial attempts at creativity and the nervousness of making public your first works. Perhaps you'll have similar disappointment if other people criticize your work, as my own poetry has been volatile in quality.

Your strongest portion was the final two lines. I agree that your first three lines distance yourself away from knowing what love is, but until the final two lines, everything said contradicts your stated purpose. Noting the "deep scar" you suffer from indicates you experienced the love you claim not to have experienced. It's contradictory.

The sentiment is there. To create a more poetic feel without diction changes, be cautious of how much punctuation you use. Unless you want each phrase to sit heavily on the tongue and weigh heavily in the mind, enjambment and shorter pauses create a greater flow. And even if heavy thoughts were your intention, a more realistic flow of thought would serve your purpose better.

[MorpheusSandman]

If you're a teenager, then the best thing you can realize is that you have plenty of years to learn, practice, and improve. If I was to be brutally honest, this isn't really a good piece, but you should take that as a positive. As the cliche goes, you learn more from failure than success. Knowing what not to do is more valuable than knowing what to do. Your biggest problem here is that the entire piece is in abstracts. Love, scars, cures, the inside, etc. are concepts rather than something concrete. Imagery, or the concept of relating abstract ideas, emotions, etc. to things that are tangible through metaphor, symbols, or simile, is so essentially to great poetry, and you really don't have a single image here except for the sun setting/rising in the last two lines. Instead of talking about love being strange or it creating a deep scar, think about something strange to compare love to, or think about how you can relate the scar love leaves to a physical scar you might get. Instead of just saying "it's a pain on the inside", think of something painful to relate it to. In fact, you don't even have to make the connections clear. Think of a scene to describe that imitates how painful love can be. As for form, this is free verse, but I tend to think new poets use free verse before they should. It's better to practice strict forms and verses to understand their inherent creative potential and limitations, so you can come to free verse as someone in more control of your craft. Free verse isn't free, as one great poet/critic said, and understanding how to utilize syntax, rhythm, line breaks, phonetics, etc. is essential to giving free verse its power. If you want to read masters of it, then Whitman and TS Eliot are musts.

The best advice I can give is to read as much of the great poets as you can, study them via their best critics, learn about the craft, and practice, practice, practice and never be afraid to fail.

[hillwalker]

An interesting piece - a little repetitive and self-pitying at times (but understandable given the subject matter) but I thought the final two lines rounded off the sense of self-sacrifice extremely effectively

As for what you call it - forget about structure/rhyme scheme. You have the 'voice' of a poet because this read smoothly and naturally.

H

[DistortedMemory]

Thanks for all the replies once again, positive and negative feedback is always helpful.
I didn't expect to get as many positive responces initially, so getting the first was greatly appreciated.
I'll still need to work on poetry and the 'rules' of it all, but as for this I used it as more of a voice than something which would have been controlled and structured.