Monster

[AutumnRain]

I used to care about stupid things like
What others saw when they looked at me?
Or what they thought
Or what they felt
I couldn’t even leave my house without make up
I used to care about stupid things

I used to be afraid of walking alone
Especially when the moon was shining on the wet pavement glistening beneath my feet
And the fog was thick under each street lamp that seemed miles away from one another as the dark sneaked up behind me
Whispering in my ear
Telling me that I wasn’t really alone
That the monsters would find me

I welcome it now
I long for the day that something slips from in between those dripping trees in the dead of night
Pulling me into its arms and taking me to a warmer place than here

I used to hate the silence that followed me everywhere I went
On these empty streets in this ghost town
This graveyard
The ominous wake of nothing swallowing the atmosphere and stalking me like prey
My own footsteps ringing in my head
Glancing over my shoulder every now and then

Things are different now
I look around these barren streets as the fog suffocates me
The factory smoke climbs for the sky and imitates the clouds
The moon is traveling fast above and if you look close enough and squint your eyes you can just make out the faint ring of the dark side of the moon

Now I wait
I long for one of the monsters to appear
Because if they did

I’d finally have peace

[Buh4Bee]

I like the stream of conscious style here. I always like how reading in first person creates a nice level of intimacy between the writer's voice and the reader.

[Hawkman]

AR: Hello, and welcome to the forum. Firstly, it's kind of forum etiquette that one doesn't post more than one thread a day in any particular strand. By all means, you can make multiple posts daily but when you post a new thread it pushes someone else's down the boards. Some members like to put all their poems in a single thread (I don't as it makes individual poems hard to find) but otherwise please only post one per day. There's nothing to stop you putting up two poems in the same thread.

Actually quite impressed with your writing. I've looked at both your posts today and I like what I see. However, This particular poem doesn't quite qualify as poetry for me. It reads as prose. If this were laid out in a paragraph and punctuated, I'd think I was reading the opening to a short story. There's more to poetry than taking a piece of writing, throwing in some random line breaks and leaving out the punctuation. Your other poem, is much more poetic, although you do occasionally lapse into prose, with lines like, "Everything was soft and comfortable", and,

"Your smile covered me like a warm blanket when the wind and rain started knocking on our door
unannounced"

in order to make this poetic you need to edit it a bit, like this:

"Your smile covered me,
a warm blanket against wind and rain
that knocked,
unwelcome at our door."

OK, so this isn't entirely appropriate, but I just wanted to illustrate how poetry allows you to leave out certain words that a sentence in prose requires. It also demonstrates how you can use line breaks more effectivley. I would also encourage you to think about punctuation. Punctuation guides the reader through the text, creates pauses, emphasis and allows the line to convey so much more than a simple sgtring of words.

You might also want to think about how you present your work. It is established tecnique to capitalise the first letter of a word at the start of a line, but these days it is far less common. To be honest, it's much easier to read if you only capitalise proper nouns and at the start of sentences, rather than the start of lines. It makes the read much more natural and fluid.

Anyway, Thanks for sharing these and I look forward to seeing more of your work.

Live and be well - H