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Daily Deviation
Daily Deviation
October 26, 2012
Concise, cutthroat, and a truth that challenges a common way of thinking. punitive by *Hersoftestsoul
Featured by Nichrysalis
Suggested by LadyofGaerdon
Literature
The Waste World
She said create the world, so I did. I made it dark and dusty, coughed up from my own black lungs. I gave the trees an ashen hue and the ground a color to match the starless sky. The creatures were murmuring oozes, globs of drying acrylic that inked across the orb of my bubbling imagination.
Repulsing, it was in fact the product of an industrial mind. I was born from man's smog goddess and, if memory serves me, her breath was laced in exhaust which I inhaled nightly with her songs. She was soothing and complacent, her voice smokey like a hazy bar. No one could deny her features were hideous beyond belief. Her skin dripped pollution like morp
Literature
OCD
I count the cracks in between the blocks of cement beneath me as I walk. Two. Two. Four. Four. Always four sets of that. Always two, two, four, four. Four times each. Look up. Blink 8 times. Two sets of four. Then back down. Two, two, four, four.
Safe. Those numbers are safe. Even, not odd. Odd is bad. 'Odd' is what people call you when you're different. Bad. Wrong.
Two, two, four, four. I try to focus on something else, not on how many steps I'm taking, because there are people behind me. Person. One set of footsteps. Bad. Half of two. I think of it as two feet, and that's better. I feel better.
I round a corner, looking for my goal. Alwa
Literature
plumbum
she has a heart of gold
and she, a heart of lead
and she, a heart of uranium.
and they go walking sometimes, the three of them.
gold is confident in her worth,
untarnishable
bought and sold and bought and sold
the virgin whore
and lead behind,
heart heavy in her chest
guilt from bullets
and pride from pipes
and anxiety from irreparable brain damage
and somewhere off to the side treads uranium,
tumors growing,
white skin glowing,
thin frame for a dense core.
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it doesn't fucking matter what I was wearing at the time.
EDIT: Ohhh my goodness thank you. My second DD! This makes me so happy. Thank you to all who've read, favourited and/or commented. It means a lot to me.
EDIT: Ohhh my goodness thank you. My second DD! This makes me so happy. Thank you to all who've read, favourited and/or commented. It means a lot to me.
Mature
© 2011 - 2024 toxic-nebulae
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Coincidence led me to this poem. It was the title that aroused my interest, yet the content kept me spellbound. I think this is a great piece of work, which is mirrored in its being a Daily Deviation, and feel obliged to write a critique.
The title is always the first thing I notice. It's the hardest part, really, to sum up the content in a word or two. The poet here used “punitive”. I really like that choice – it is one word, not over-commonly used, and it tells the reader about the content in some way, too, without spoiling anything. This title is very nicely chosen indeed.
“I do not believe you.” A sentence, slightly apart from the following text, that blames a person yet unknown. This choice of word is more elegant than saying that someone is a liar, though it is the same thing. But the package matters, too, and I as a reader was already drawn into the poem at that point. You wonder, what did the person lie about, how grave is the matter, really? It could be anything at that point.
The next sentence gave me a deeper understanding of what the poem really is about. The topic, if I understood correctly, is a sensitive one, something people don't like talking about. Yet the poem screams at the top of its lungs, without the poet really making it seem as if she tried to do just that. I really adore that talent: the poem is written in an off-hand manner, as if it did not really matter, somehow, but it's mattering a lot.
I love the sentence “which drove you to hunger.” A limitless choice of words could have been chosen here, like everywhere in the poem of course, but it was that very special one. It makes the person spoken to – the one the title refers to – seem like an animal, completely instinct and without reason. That creates a dangerous image indeed. There's a lot of accusation behind that sentence, too, but not in self-pity. It's cold fact, as if the poet spoke to the person, years later, and answered to a thing that person said, as if it wasn't his – I assume it's a man – fault.
Coming to the next part of the poem, “vile” here is stating how very bad the thing that was done is, not a minor fling. The right of the person to “what was not” theirs, is “imagined”, therefore it is stated clearly that the person should not have done the deed, that it was wrong. Yet the person took what it wanted, without caring about the speaker of the poem. This cruel egoism seems to be highly despised by the voice in the poem. Which only more enforces the message: You should not have done it. It was wrong. “Greed” again, as in “hunger”, diminishes the person and transforms it into an animal at best.
Next part makes the thing get even more serious: “try to convince the court”, so apparently the speaker has accused the person, in front of others, and now the person is trying to convince the court that it was a mutual thing, that it was the speakers fault, anything, to get the neck out of the rope. The populace, “who think they have a right to decide” is also, it seems, looked upon by the victim with cold eyes, as if they are not better than the culprit, only feeling they are. The victim (lacking a better word) is not openly relying on other people – maybe it is, but does not show that – and thinks, maybe, that they are all the same. It only depends on which side they sit on.
The word “slut” in a poem is difficult, normally. It would completely kill any style, but in this one, it's perfect. It describes how the woman, already having mentally and physically suffered, encounters that word. As if she wanted it and now she blames the innocent, poor man for something that was her doing, because she possibly teased him and he had no choice. The popped balloon is a nice image, it's gone, but there's shock before, and now it's burst and there's nothing you can do to bring it back. The word cannot be unsaid – the meaning neither, whatever the other people would do now. It seems to me as if the culprit used the word (slut) while talking about his victim. Again, to say that he couldn't do anything else, that it was not his idea, after all.
“You are all deathly sick and determinedly wrong” - not only the culprit is, everyone is, the reader maybe, the people at court. “Deathly” and “determinedly” is a nice alliteration. Both are words that describe that the behaviour is fatal – and that the people know and don't care. They build a mass, acting against the speaker in the poem, knowing they do.
“The fuse was lit by his hand” - it's his doing, not the speakers, don't you see? That's what screams out at me, open your eyes, people.
In short: This is an amazing poem about a topic that is not. I love it, not because it's stylistically interesting and beautifully written, but because it brings the words across in a manner that cannot make you look away. Chapeau to the poet... And I sincerely hope this never happened to you.