A Bad Day

Today was is a bad day

You're drinking again

I hate it when you drink

You slur out words with your bottom lip cracked

Your eyes glazed over

When you cry it feels like it's just your body's way of getting rid of the toxins

I want to rip myself apart knowing that I am even one small bit a part of you 

Today is a bad day 

I've wanted to cry more times than I can count

But instead

I stare blankly at the road and try to keep my hands on the steering wheel 

While your pipeline hand roughly lovingly touches my head 

I feel sick because of you 

Today is a bad day

I was reminded of how little much I mean to you 

Reviews

[JayG]

• You're drinking again

No, I'm not, nor was I ever a drinker. You must have me confused with someone else.

• I hate it when you drink

Why would you think that someone who doesn't know anything about you would think a diatribe by someone unknown, against someone not specified, broken into lines, is poetic?

David Sedaris put it well when he said: “The returning student had recently come through a difficult divorce, and because her pain was significant, she wrongly insisted her writing was significant as well.”

When you read your own work you have experience, backstory, and all the emotions roiling through you, called up by those words. So for you, it's real, and filled with emotion. For the reader? It's a report by someone unknown on how they feel—dispassionate and lacking all context.

But poetry isn't a way of passing facts, it's meant to stir emotions in the reader's mind. And to do that, you need to make them feel and care, not just know. Instead of telling them why you hurt, make them say, "That b*****d!" Involve them, don't lecture them. Take the time to learn the tricks of poetry and make them work for you.

We tend to think that we learned to write, and that if we say something that's filled with emotion, for us, the reader will get that emotion. But it's not that easy, and definitely worth the effort of acquiring the necessary skills.

One trick I've found useful is to have the computer's Narrator program read the work to me. That tends to strip out the emotion the author would place into the reading, and places you more in the reader's chair, where all your editing should be done from. In short: Don't tell the reader it's raining. That's fact. Instead, make them feel the rain. THAT''S poetic.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/

[Celine]

Hi Jay

Thank you for your feedback.

I was supposed to say in the description that is more of an outpour of emotion and prose rather than a defined and articulated form of poetry.

I haven't visited this site in about 5 years.

Most of the work that I have uploaded has been raw, unedited and spontaneous.

I appreciate your useful tips in terms of how to refine this more and turn it into poetry rather than just me venting.

It was quite literally a bad day today. I tend to pick apart my emotions and thoughts and jot them down in the above "spoken word" or "prose" format, not really adhering to any structure.

I will consider reflecting and refining this.

Many thanks
Celine

[JayG]

It wasn't mean as an attack, and what you're doing, so far as presentation, is really common, because in our school days, no one ever tells us that there's a LOT to writing poetry that's not obvious—or that the only writing skills we're given are nonfiction. So, when we try to write either poetry of fiction, the approach we use is nonfiction, an all too often the result reads as a series of declarative sentences—a report.

You might want to read the excerpt to Stephen Fry's, The Ode Less Traveled, on Amazon. His focus is on structured poetry, but still, what he has to say about prosody, and the flow of words, in general, is something I recommend to any writer.