Give me feedback you cowards!

I wrote this a little before the climate dread actually got me. Didn’t touch it for a while and did some editing over the past day.

I don’t like that the poem feels hopelesness, I don’t want to sell hopelessness in hopeless times. I eventually recovered from the episode so there is a semi hopeful ending there. I just don’t know what to write.

Please tell me what you like, dislike or how it made you feel

  • queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    It resonates with me, sitting here with my cat and my air-conditioning in the 100F (38C) of mid-September, mainlining news of the apocalypse in between small chores and the relentless job hunt. There’s a lot of bad shit going on that I can’t control, and if I let it get too close it will paralyze me with its venom.

    The first person (and consequently the second person) is a little hard to parse. In the first section (reading left column to right column) it is the person being stalked by the specter, at the start of the second section it switches to (I guess) the specter itself, then in the third and fourth sections it’s both. Maybe a commentary on how we’re doing this to ourselves but I found myself taken out of the work to try and figure out who was saying what.

    Not sure what the guild is in this context, it seems to come in from nowhere. Is the specter the guild? Or are they two different things, in which case, why is the guild helping the specter?

    How did it make me feel: It made me feel less alone in the mountain climb we are all midway through, on our respective edges of the internet. Thanks for sharing ❤️

    • Goodman@discuss.tchncs.deOP
      3·
      2 months ago

      Thanks for the feedback. I felt so bad after writing it. I considered not publishing it because I don’t want to make other people feel hopeless so I’m glad that it made you feel less lonely.

      I will reread it tomorrow and see if I can workshop the perspective a bit. The guild was supposed to be guilt, but I already changed that.

      • queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        Yeah, I feel the pressure to not be a downer poet too. But I think unpleasant feelings are a natural reaction to unpleasant things, and the world is going through some real fuckin… unpleasantness right now. I think it’s cathartic.

        • Goodman@discuss.tchncs.deOP
          1·
          2 months ago

          I reread it and I changed the penultimate line to include the specter. I thope that the added information will help readers solve the meaning of the bold lines, since the main POV is being asphyxiated and the other, unclear part/POV/subject is doing the strangling. But you would have to read it twice to get it.

          I also removed some of periods to make the last section feel more stressful.

          Lastly I removed the period from the first line to let it blend into the first stanza, indicating that the main POV and the specter are actually the same.

          At the back of your mind

          there is a specter.
          Always stalking,
          always talking.

          Whispers of truths,
          fires, famine, fear
          too terrible to hear.

          If I linger to listen,
          It’s spell will find me,
          it’s fear will bind me.

          You see me everywhere.

          It looms
          in the rising spire,
          over the forest fire.

          It leers
          from the dry riverbed,
          where fish lie dead.

          I’m getting closer now…

          I’m pacing
          heart racing.
          All the distress
          I can’t express!

          All the headlines
          missed deadlines
          records reached
          tipping points breached.

          And then, I strangle you!

          the guilt
          asphyxiating me
          the specter
          asphyxiating me.

  • CombatWombat@feddit.onlineEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    Four bold lines kinda looks like four panels… first line is worry, second line is getting closer…. someone seeing someone else in the third… dead person in the last panel…

    Is this loss?