1/16/2022 12:22:18 PM
Constantinos Dino Doonan
Posts: 5
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My Plague
How dare you touch my bride,
Do you not know who I am?
My words bring suicide,
I am a dangerous dagger,
That will slowly cut your insides out,
If you thought this was a joke,
I will show you to my rope,
Alive you will be through all of this pain,
I will give you the same pain you give me,
Day in, day out of torture, until the last act,
I will cut off your face,
And wear it as my own, perfectly sewn,
Do you think she’ll love me more?
Or do you think I'll be out the door?
Only time will tell so keep crying from my well,
Don’t worry no one will hear you yell,
I will putrefy your remains under my floor,
It will be the perfect scent for settling our score,
Maybe next time choose a different whore.
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2/1/2022 10:05:00 AM
Jack Webster
Posts: 255
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Passionate. Dark. Poe-ish.
You do a lot of lovely things with language, in terms of rhyme and rhythm, shifts of sound. An intuitive fierceness of d’s and t’s throughout.
The iambs in line one are a really clean rhythm to open with. In terms of time, all the words are well-weighted with morae, all long vowels, diphthongs, closed syllables - all the words are heavy, yet they still pulse with a heavier rythm, matched by placing monosyllabic words at the stressed syllables. The d and t are great back to back, and beginning the poem with two plosive consonants in the onsets on the very first stressed syllables really sets the tone for the poem. Dare and bride have a round, throaty, elastic quality, the way a stalking tiger draws out a soft low growl from the shadows.
Bride and suicide are fresh rhymes, original, but it is uncertain just where the suicide fits in. Will the bride want to commit suicide, does the speaker, will the victim? The body of the work is about torturing the subject to death. If it is the victim the words bring suicide, perhaps it could be more clearly phrased with something a little more precise while staying in the dark theme, perhaps something like: you will not escape through suicide...
The alliteration on dangerous dagger is good.
‘Slowly cut your insides out’ carries the passion, but i think you could do more with it. Get your hands dirty. Play with the images, the symbolism. The poem has a theme of infidelity, which is right next door to the idea of unplanned pregnancy, abortion, or birth, cesaerean, which comes back to the stomach, the bowels, so to speak. Perhaps the bride became pregnant, but the speaker cannot harm his bride so he performs a symbolic cesarean/ abortion on the victim, cutting open his stomach and removing his s*** filled bowels - symbolic of the baby he can’t remove from his bride. Or, it could be something simpler - for some reason the soul is thought to be around the navel, so it could be something like, ‘I’m am the dagger that will search your bowels for your soul, and prove there is nothing there but s***’. Simply saying you are going to slowly cut someone’s insides out is like reading a promise on the menu - serve the actual dish.
I love the slant rhyme joke and rope. In terms of sound, they might play better reversed. Rope has kind of a soft sound to it because of the r and the p, and joke has a much sharper sound because of the j and the k. Reversing them might play as rope being tied tight - something like: did you know I know how to tie laughter up with rope? Your wrists will know it’s not a joke.
Alive you will be is sort of an odd/ineffective inversion. I think you’re trying to place ‘be’ nearer the middle of the line to place the rhyme nearer to ‘me’ in the following line? Also, repeating the word pain the following line is a little too soon. Perhaps they could be restated as: you will be aive through all this pain/ you and I will know the same.
Day in, day out - is a little pedestrian. Perhaps something like: the days of torture will bleed together. Here you get to use bleed as a double entendre, and it gives a visual, concrete, and thematic element to the abstract concept of time.
“I will cut off your face,
And wear it as my own, perfectly sewn,
Do you think she’ll love me more?” Is the strongest part of the poem. It is precise in its concrete graphic language - it takes the abstract question: would she love me if i was more like you? - and gives it a concrete image, projected through the lens of rage and pain. There is tremendous vulnerability beneath the mask of dismembered flesh, something very raw. The wound behind the rage.
I think you need to ditch rhyming more with door. The previous three lines are so strong, door is just too weak a rhyme. Morgue would be a stronger rhyme:
“...do you think she will love me more...” : or will she go to the morgue. Not quite the same as asking if she will abandon you, but it still captures the idea of her chosing between the speaker and the victim.
Only time will tell - is another pedestrian kind of phrase. Also, it’s not quite true - the victim will never live long enough to know the outcome of the previous question. I think emphasizing the fact the victim won’t ever know what happens to her or how things turn out is much darker than simply saying only time will tell.
The bit about crying from the well and no one will hear you yell is a mix of confusion and cliche. Is the speaker implying the victim is kept in a well à la Silence of the Lambs? Until this point in the poem, there really isn’t a specific time and place - acts are being proposed hypothetically. The bit about the well is a bit jarring because it suddenly shifts from a hypothetical space into a concrete time and place that hasn’t really been defined. No one will hear you yell is a horror genre cliche. You might just consider editing out the lines about yelling from the well and no one hearing the victim scream (or come at it from a fresh direction) - because the next two lines are so much stronger.
The perfect scent for settling our score — this is gold. Unifying the two halves of the phrase around the sce/se sound is absolutely wonderful, as well as the p in perfect following through from the p in putrefy in the previous line
“I will putrefy your remains under my floor,
It will be the perfect scent for settling our score” are some of the strongest lines in the poem.
The last line doesn’t work. Why? Cause there won’t be a next time, will there.
Fantastic draft. I can tell you are b*lls deep in your writing. Go deeper.
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