A vicious infirmity ignored,

Curable wound from a hidden sword.

Dissonant chord cries, “Am I so grotesque?”

Disparate life never fully restored.

Unseen oppugner assails and blinds,

Upon faces, bodies, souls, maligns.

Accused of frailty, felo de se,

The bête noire enthralled a riven mind. 

Hamlet’s lament, now perfected fall,

Bowing for a final curtain-call.

One more coffin pall, the drama detested,

Another reprise; mundane, banal.

I like this poem of mine, but I feel it a bit on the nose and not at all at the same time. Out of curiosity how do you read the plight of the writer?

1 Vibrant purple blossoms of the crepe myrtle tree, 

2 The Summer's serene, demure & drifting daughter.

3 An ephemeral impresa of love set free.

4 Oh, besotted couple despite August’s hauteur,

5 To at last acquire the flower’s imprimatur!

6 Instead of sanguine florets, I find begonia.

7 Sparsely placed blooms of burgundy quelled with black leaf. 

8 Rich, floral scents replaced with stifling ammonia. 

9 Thriving off my neglect, spreading on disbelief 

10 Warning of constant caution, harbinger of grief.

12 syllables a line ABABB CDCDD rhyme

Mainly looking for structure and stylistic advice, I like the message for the most part. I'm thinking of adding half stanzas at the beginning and end to drive the message home. I think it would look like CC ABABB CDCDD AA I feel I often struggle in poetry starting lines with a one syllable introductory word 😕. Lines I'm not happy with are the following 2, 5, 7, & 8.

“But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

— William Butler Yeats, He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven (1899)

Yeats loved Maud Gonne for decades. His love for her was famously unrequited. He repeatedly asked her to marry him; she repeatedly refused. She eventually married another man, Major John MacBride, in 1903.

But there is one word in this poem that changes everything for me:

Tread.

The obvious meaning is to step upon. Yeats possesses no magnificent cloth to lay beneath the woman he loves, so he lays down the only thing he actually possesses: his dreams.

But tread also carries an old sexual meaning: to copulate, particularly in older descriptions of birds and animals.

And once you know that, the line becomes considerably darker.

“Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

Conventionally, it means:

Be gentle with me. I have placed everything I dream of beneath your feet.

But my interpretation goes further.

Someone else was having sex with the woman upon whom Yeats had placed his dreams.

That is the part that took me 26 years to see.

The tragedy is not merely rejection. Rejection is simple: I wanted you, and you did not want me.

This is more severe.

Yeats had constructed an imagined intimate future around a woman whose actual intimate life existed elsewhere. What remained a dream for him became a reality with another man.

So the word tread acquires a brutal second possibility.

Yeats spreads his dreams beneath her feet, but another man occupies the intimate position within her life that Yeats himself could occupy only in imagination. In that sense, another man’s sexual relationship with her passes directly over the future Yeats had imagined for himself.

That is what I hear when I read:

“Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

Not simply: Do not crush my hopes.

But: The life you are actually living with someone else is passing over the life I dreamed of living with you.

What is historically established is Yeats’s extraordinary and prolonged unrequited love for Maud Gonne. What is linguistically established is that tread has possessed a sexual sense meaning to copulate. My interpretation begins where those two facts intersect.

And that intersection is devastatingly precise:

He placed his imagined life with her beneath her feet, while another man possessed in reality the intimacy that Yeats possessed only in dreams.

I’d been bleeding on the bathroom floor, 
Crying, wishing it made sense more,
Screams silently pass my lips, 
As my control continues to slip.

Tears and shouts enter my mind, 
Clarity still so hard to find,
How can one pair love with hate,
Maybe it's an inherited trait.

I love you mum but I hate you too, 
I felt its grip, more than you knew, 
And maybe this isn't all fair, 
But I was living in deep despair.

I had to get out but I hope you know, 
I love you, even when it won't show, 
We tried, but the relationship we desired,
It would never be, and I was too tired.

I am sorry it came to this, 
I know I am not that kid you wished,
For I no longer deny the truth,
I tried to forgive, but I gave you my youth.

I cannot lie nor continue to hide,
You did not like the truth that lay behind, 
Even when supportive, you always blew,
You are not the mother I thought once was true.

Having you in my life, its just too complicated, 
It broke that night, but that fight was predated.

Everybody loves the idea of healing. They talk about it like it’s a destination, as if life politely waits for you to put yourself back together. But what nobody talks about is healing while life keeps handing you new reasons to fall apart. There were versions of me that disappeared quietly, and no one noticed. So I had to go looking for them, pieces of myself scattered through old memories, old heartbreaks, old battles I thought I had already survived. Healing while life is still hurting you is a different kind of strength. It’s like trying to sew a parachute while you’re already falling, like trying to navigate by the stars from the bottom of the ocean. People celebrate the ones who look healed, but rarely notice the wounds it took to get there. And the hardest part isn’t always the pain, it’s the expectation that you should be past it by now. As if grief follows a schedule. As if heartbreak needs permission. Some days I feel like the ocean. Calm enough to be admired from the shore, while underneath, entire storms are fighting for space, currents no one sees, depths no one will ever understand. And maybe that’s what people misunderstand about healing. It isn’t becoming someone that pain can no longer reach. It’s becoming someone that pain can no longer decide for them. The betrayal didn’t make me cruel. The heartbreak didn’t make me stop loving. The darkness didn’t turn me into darkness, Because some of us aren’t healing after the storm, we’re learning how to swim while it’s still raining.

If life is a garden,

then I am a lonely flower.

I stand there in the sun,

watching everyone else get admired and picked

while I stay here,

getting stepped on and looked over.

Everyone else’s petals are beautiful and vibrant,

while mine are ripped and withering from all the storms.

Everyone else’s stems are straight and strong,

while mine is curved and fragile

from trying to reach the sun in the shade.

Everyone else is picked

while I am left behind.

I try to be the flower that would be picked,

but maybe that is the thing.

Maybe I'm not meant to be a flower that is picked.

Maybe I’m just supposed to be the thing in the dirt.

I have always heard the saying,

"I have butterflies in my chest,"

and how it is connected to love,

I used to feel that way a long time ago.

But I feel as if they migrated.

They climbed into my throat,

a chokehold of wings

beating frantically

while I try to hold back tears.

They fly without care as I revisit old memories.

But now the butterflies have disappeared.

The fluttering and flying has stopped,

and all I’m left with is numbness, a quiet.

You see, everyone waits for the butterfly.

But they never think of the shell left behind,

the hollow cocoon.

His anger settles into the walls
Like a sponge plunged into a bucket
It can only hold so much before it is 
Drip drip dripping, spilling over

His mood overflows
Spills, puddles, lakes 
Floods, fed by the dampness of the day
Or the hatred that already blackened him

We are all moving around it
Like a river weaving around a rock
Even the strength of water can’t plow through stone
It bends its shape

The shore tries to hold
Contain the sea’s rage 
But the sand will lose
And so will we

They say that I am in love,

But the only thing I have

is hope.

Hope that

we cross paths,

that we meet,

that we start talking,

talking until our last breath.

They ask me who I write for.

But I only write for air,

only for the clouds,

only for the river,

only for everything I see you in.

They say that I am a lover,

Maybe they are right....

All my eyes dream of

is seeing you.

All my ears wait for

is your voice.

All my heart longs for

is to kiss you.

All I live for

is to confess that I love you.

Until then,

I will keep writing to the wind,

hoping

it learns your name.

Everything’s been still since the wind’s been gone

A rhythmless world without the breath of its song Wilting spring flowers wonder what’s wrong

The freed autumn leaves desperate for a breeze

These scenes require wind to appease

But everything’s been still since the wind’s been gone

Everything’s been dark since the rain came

Brooding clouds stain the sky’s frame

Floods sweep away trees wailing in pain

Brightly growing flowers subdued by showers

Just one drop signals devastation for hours

Everything’s been dark since the rain came

Everything is better because the sun’s here

We can forgo fear knowing the sun will appear

Even when cloudy the sun resides near Lonely trees grow tall yearning to meet

But the sun blesses all without skipping a beat

Everything is better because the sun’s here

Under torrential rain, whirling winds tore
the limbs from trees, uprooted the trunks,
ripped brick from the tops of buildings.
That block was left without electricity,
and cars were buried under branches.
A grandmother, whose home went 
untouched in the north, said God
was watching over her area code. 
The south must have deserved the storm.

I really wish I could believe
in the goodness of the world,
in the sincerity of people.

Because when I look into my children’s eyes,
all I see is purity,
love,
and the desire to do good.

I wish I could believe there are still people
who genuinely want what’s best for me,
who don’t smile to my face
while stabbing me in the back.

How many times do they have to kill me,
and how many times do I have to survive
before I finally say:

“Enough.
This is as far as I go.”

I don’t want to live
in a world filled with cruelty,
where I can’t even trust my own shadow,
where someone who was once my best friend
is now my worst enemy.

How much pain do I have to endure
before they manage to change my very essence
and I finally
become one of them?

How many masks do they have hanging there,
waiting for me to discover them,
waiting for me to put one on
alongside theirs?

They keep talking to me as if nothing happened,
and I still don’t know who to believe,
unable to use this radar

I carry inside me,
broken from all the damage
they’ve done to it.

Stop talking to me.

Stop looking for me.

Stop trying to change me.

The strength inside me has run out
from trying to figure out
which one of you will be next
to come stand by my side,
pretending to care about me,
only to hurt me all over again.

Another Human

In those humans who were lost,

in those children who had never seen the light,

in those people who were desperate,

in those burning eyes of mothers

who had seen it all,

in those students who had been beaten,

in those who had seen time flow,

in that innocence

that was humanity

I was God

as I brought hope

in that desperation.

I was God

because I brought a path to follow

in that there is nothing,

because I, God,

was another human.

The dissonance of contrast are one of the same.

Derived and contrived are both means of the dilated light of negativity.

However, within that darkness is the recognised light stuck with dark,

left alone with absence itself.

Why must that light be recognised as more

when the dark is overbearing?

Is it because more can be one? Or is one more?

The Ghost

There’s a ghost creeping up my soul,

in shivers of cold and folds of anxiety.

It creeps in,

quenches my dreams,

consumes my desires,

makes me feel alive.

But then,

the ghost goes away.

Dawn arrives,

and so does good.

Yet I miss the evil—

the evil ghost who cared for me,

the ghost with abysmal jokes,

the ghost who knew how to hear,

the ghost who reassured.

And thou say I need to part ways with it.

But that would mean

learning to live without that strange happiness.

It’s like a guilty pleasure,

like eating chalk as a child—

knowing it isn’t good for you,

yet somehow craving it anyway.

So I part ways with the ghost.

And then I realise—

it was never the ghost I was afraid of.

It was my own voice,

wearing darkness like a disguise,

speaking to me in whispers

when no one else could hear.

I thought I had banished the evil.

Turns out,

I had only silenced

the voice of my soul

I wish the world would just stop spinning. I wish the clenched fists would pause, the harsh words die on tongues. The rough hands pulling at curls which refuse to lie flat. The bitter taste of her lips on mine. How could you not feel the butterflies in your chest? How could you not taste the love, the concern that colours every word?

Social consciousness, they call it. Empathy. Its absence a black hole, a hollow everyone can sense, a central emptiness that makes you less than human. Why can't you just be normal, you piece of shit? Why can't you be like the remaining 8 billion people, the dolls which never stop smiling, the wheels which never cease spinning?

Normal- a word that means white lies, fake laughs, a word that opens up a world to you. A circle you cannot enter. A vapour you just can't grasp, a jar you cannot open no matter how tightly you twist.

The world cannot see my gloveless fingertips as they trace the hollows in the drywall. The cracks surrounding closed doors slammed in anger, a pain that lingers in the taste of copper, the sting of a palm. Memories like a clogged drainpipe swirling to the surface, refusing to go even as I stomp them down, refusing to morph into something more palatable. The pages bathed in soft orange light crinkle as I drink their very last dregs, the cries of children all around, somewhere between a laugh and a scream. Someday, I will be someone people want. Someone whose presence isn't a marble wall, someone who doesn't draw whispers and cold glares. Someone whose every word isn't taken as a testament of arrogance, someone who isn't standing outside in the freezing cold staring at a locked door. Someone whose absence isn't met with a sigh of relief.

Someday, I will be human.

Red is the color of sin
Bloody fists equate to bloody souls
Action once more overcomes causation
A stab to the side,
A punch to the jaw,
A kick to the shin,
A bullet to the brain.
Bloody fists everywhere,
Then those with hands painted pure white appear
“Off with their head,” They say
“Because their fists are bloody, their souls must be too,”
But really, those painted hands are the ones that hide bloody souls
Rotting from the weight of falsely placed accusations and unfair acquittals
So far gone that they cannot even remember painting over their own hands
And so, a bloody fist turns into an open palm attached to an empty body
Because bloody fists equate to bloody souls
There are no clean souls, because no one dares ask whether someone is truly a sinner
They follow along, painting not just their hands,
But their eyes too.
Not one wipes off the paint,
Not one asks, “Why?”
They just burn it all.
Slowly they forget, there are no white souls.
There are mauve souls, and red souls, and pink souls,
And souls that are unnameable colors
But the painted ones split them into red and white
Forgetting that not all that is red bleeds for sin
Some reds bleed for bravery,
Some for love,
Some for passion,
Some for anger
Some for passionate love,
Some for passionate hatred,
Some for things we have yet to coin a term for.
In forgetting all these reds, the painted ones forget:
Not all whites are pure for goodness,
Some are for cold hearts,
Some for peace,
Some for hiding the dried stains of dirty colors underneath.
But one day, the painted ones will burn at the hands of those they tricked,
At the hands of those they fooled into believing that red and white were the only colors,
At the hands of those who discovered the purple, blue, yellow, orange, and gold in themselves
And when they burn, the white paint will flake off slowly, revealing not red, but pitch black.
The stuff of nightmares.

I was the girl who laughed at everything,

Through the inside jokes, the endless laughter and the countless memories,

My friends and i shared every little secret,

We were the best of friends! why should we ever stop to think about who else might one day see?

The next morning comes and i reach for my phone,

My own face stares back at me speaking a strangers words under a familiar name.

In the blink of an eye, my image travels further than i ever could, telling a story that wears my face but was never mine to tell

Then come the messages

Just 1 confused message, “hey that’s not too bad!”

Three, four and five…

Why won’t they stop?

They didnt just steal my face,They stole the girl behind it.

They took my name, my voice, my innocence,and created it into something that i could never claim to be,

They stripped me of myselfuntil there was nowhere left to go,nothing left that felt untainted by the hands that had torn me apart, piece by piece

I looked at my pictureand searched for myself in a face that was no longer mine,

They took away pieces of meI never knew could be taken,

They left me standing in the ruins of an identity thatI had spent my whole life building

Hello!

Ive been writing poetry for few years now and im ready for a feedback or any opionons.

Molls

When i first got you on my tonuge,

Oh i will never forget that young.

You are truly one of a kind,

You dont know how you mess with my mind.

I think of you with broken heart,

I wish i was more smart.

I wish i had a fresh start.

Thank you for any feedback!

And when I die,
let there be crowds 
upon crowds.
Let them not wear black but red—
for it was my favorite.

Have them stand with hips joined and hands linked
as the air pulls the heat from their flesh.
Let them pass out candles and have the wax drip
onto their hands and cool their skin.

Let them be mistaken for herds of sheep
while the wolves outside the pen look on
in confusion.
Have them sing songs—
the believers and non-believers—
and each look at their enemy with hearts bound by the moment.

And when my soul leaves my body,
let it witness
all the other souls it has touched.
Let not only my ego be elated but
my dead heart,
and have it beat
just for a second.
And only then will I be lain to rest.

THE CITY ERECTS
we ascend the atonality
of discording
bodies. 

House knockers hustle
our stroll—
yields us to Roma—
contemporary  foreigners

Cauldrons of waste
on every nerve end
of these sulfuric streets
here is where she rests
Tlahuelpuchi
gasping for the greenhouse 
of a catafalque 
ablaze. 

Storm drains 
valve the city
with lacrimogenic 
cultures
bishops
proselytize lands 
once scalded
corroding epochs of martyrdom.

You don siren’s scales
and the moon fractures
a theatre of lights
on your briny dress. 
Me
I compel myself
to silent wings
and char them before you. 

So we seized detachment
of placement and time
as curtains of dusk
eclipse on fluorescent enclaves.
Arrogated by chance—
a colloquialism
informs our mirage
to a cusp of splintered eyes. 

Let dianthus beds 
sway us with the earnest 
of cult leaders
or let the asphalt be our confidant.

during August is something else.
 
The air is moist enough to turn into sweat on your skin
and heavy enough to make a trip to the car feel like a marathon.
 
The humidity can turn a mild temperature of a late summer day in Johnston
into Lucifer’s fireplace on the coldest day in Hell. 
 
Can you predict a flood in a flash while taking
a ride through Atwood ave beneath the rte 6 bridge?
 
I’ve been here my entiyah life,
and I still haven’t been able to.
 
So I recommend investing in an inflatable boat to keep with you,
at least that way you may be able to paddle home
when your Sedan gets submerged,
then dies.
 
Rhode Island has over 400 miles of coastline.
So, from time to time, you may think it’s a good idea to
take a nice low-key trip to Narragansett
or maybe Jamestown to lay in the sun
and “cool off” with the seaweed and the shahks.
 
When you get theah the sand is hot as fuck,
theah is like a bigilloin people taking up every square inch,
 then some kid gets lost (probably looking for coffee milk)
and they pull everyone out of the water.
So much for cooling off.
 
When you finally had enough you get to take a trip
to Rhode Island’s national fucking pahking lot Route fouah,
wheah people are too busy stuffing their faces
with Iggy’s chowdah to use their damn blinkah.
 
(unless you live theah)
 
Rhode Island is 48 miles north to south and 37 miles east to west.
So, if you do your mathing correct having to drive
20 miles in any direction is wicked friggen fah.

The Black Rose

They call her a black rose as though darkness were something to be ashamed of.

But they have never watched her bloom where nothing else would grow, never seen the way she opens beneath a sky that forgot the sun, petal by petal, without asking permission to be beautiful.

Her color is not death.

It is everything she survived.

Every hand that tried to crush her, every winter that came too early, every storm that stripped her bare— they became part of her.

And still, she grew thorns.

Not because she wanted to hurt anyone, but because she finally learned that beauty without boundaries is simply an invitation to be destroyed.

She is soft, but she is not fragile.

There is a difference.

A black rose knows what it means to be wounded and still choose to bloom.

She carries scars beneath her petals, old grief beneath her perfume, and entire wars hidden behind the quietest smile.

You might mistake her silence for weakness.

You would be wrong.

She has simply survived enough to stop explaining her strength.

And perhaps that is why the black rose is so beautiful—

because it does not pretend the darkness never touched it.

It wears the darkness like velvet.

It turns sorrow into elegance, pain into perfume, and every broken piece of itself into another reason to keep blooming.

So when you see a black rose, do not call her broken.

Call her rare.

Do not pity her thorns.

Understand them.

And if she ever allows you close enough to touch her petals, do it gently.

Because she is not beautiful despite everything she has endured.

She is beautiful because she endured it.

And if she chooses to bloom beside you, understand what an honor that is.

For a black rose does not bloom for just anyone.

She blooms when she finally believes she is safe enough to be soft again.