/Crit/ Thread

You're not subtle nor have a grasp on the english enough to make that poetic. Read more Nabokov or Joyce

I got inspired by it and Ruinas Crirculares by borges. But i tried to be separated ffrom both. Thanks user

Beginning of first chapter. Just began writing yesterday. Rip me to shreds.

Attached: First2.png (1473x778, 156K)

I

below the reeds, the wind in amble glide, the dragonfly in fists of shade,
and the trees like green antenna by the lake,
there is a prison emptying, a hand reaching for my sleeve
from out the water—

II

on this couch of martian lovers, absently in smoke we nod,
music brewing from a wand; our translucent tomb.
the hand rose as a mint leaf blown
carefully to my shoulder. incisor of the oyster
night from which our songs diffuse.
and though i swayed in emerald fields, bit
the harpy's tit, sat on a black beach and tossed
memories into the froth— the hand was still.
it sent me toward the water.

III

to be sunk in an undine cloister, fat with mortuary bliss,
and a silence so intimate, i feel
there is no one here but the yawn of reeds.

>Stopped reading there

Same honestly, like I'm completely uninterested, idk if it's the best story opener lmao.

Anyway as for your poem, there's a charm to its simplicity and formalness without doubt. It feels a bit lackluster in terms of the imagery which doesn't really help such a short piece. You've a fair grasp of how to craft verse, your next move is just to make it a bit more interesting.

Not bad for an amateur at all, you've got decent aesthetic sensibility that can certainly be refined into something cool. A lot of the rhythm here is clunky but thats to be expected with early works. It also feels really verbose at times like "soaked in nighttime" rather than just "night", or "juvenile hunt" idk, stuff like that wasnt working for me. A lot of the language feels unnecessary and takes away from what actually does work in it. Pick your words a bit more carefully, precisely. Dont get carried away with being flowery.

Heres mine:

I tried making it with more imagery but ended up feeling too melodramatic. I'm still looking for my sweet spot

Oh please, falling in love with a freaking statue is already melodramatic enough. We're poets, everything is an exaggeration. I get what you're saying but hey, I say its better to do too much then dial it back then do too little and not know where to go.

i know i don't have to tell you all this but don't hold back

On sable roads I dream of freedom
Moonbeams and starry stairs to a place I know not where
where I am beyond my cross, my meaning, my mind
for the infinitude of time that passes by
I am within
I am without
for me and mine, ourselves is thus
to death we tread, we live for us
And when we pass, we rest
knowing that we have lived to die
And died to live

9 page document

docdroid.net/D6zA9as/the-modalities-and-practicalities-of-hell.pdf

same user here:

let there be no quiet streams
gentle brooks nor mild dreams
let there be no silent moor
closed door nor hushed roar
let this joy to be alive
burn sinew and rebirth anew
let this fury grip you tight
let it grasp, embrace its might
only freedom fought for is freedom yours
only ideas pursued bring life true
passion is as passion does
thus, without it, there never was

>13040285
I like this user. It needs some editing to maintain your academic tone more consistently (don't use terms like "ok") but your ideas are interesting and worthy of being expanded on in more writing.

poetry is something I do for fun to make myself laugh

Oxcarts rollin down the road,
Pesants with a heavy load.

The autocrat dont want no more,
He went off'n declared war.

were sent in to clear the gout,
So you see it aint our falt,
Napam stics to kids.

OP here, thanks anons. This is however, not the start of a story, but passages from the middle of a chapter that I felt not as inspired while writing them and need some help to flesh them out.
Should I make some of the parts a bit subtler? Which parts need rewriting?
My vision was to make it as exhausting and disgusting as possible that streams on and on and on without stop (think Guyotat and his French friends)

wattpad.com/727095577-a-warm-place-for-willy

Thank you :)

You should probably kill yourself.

"puzzle"

i take it upon myself
to remind me of my existence

smashing snow into my face
to feel the bitter cold

burning my skin on the candle
to feel the scorching heat

for a second i feel again
maybe i am real

but i can't remind myself
of humanity

i can't remind myself of what i feels like to be loved
to be wanted
to feel complete
defective this puzzle mine
can i be returned
or must i take that upon myself too

A green-feathered snake around her sun,
That contains the void inside her soul.
Quetzalcoatl, he did came back
A guardian for her cloud-white visage.

With all my might, I hold her small hand
She exploded as a red ballon;
Then i woke up in my lonely room,
With blood on my hand, of my dead cat

Working on a short story, any feedback appreciated.

Anton was a great student, had many friends and was quite popular in school until he ripped off his own face. Of course he felt no pain, nobody ever feels pain. It's the ideas that were planted within their brain, like a seed would be planted in rot or compost. The roots are reactions that are conditioned. The reactions are conditioned by the assigned personality to the child.
One day he awakened from his slumber, sharp at six o’clock, it was a Tuesday and he felt empty. Alas not in a way where emotions seemed to vanish, but in a sense that the instincts packaged within him to correspond with the personality were miraculously absent. He decided to test it by performing something his personality would never commit.
He took a knife. A flamboyant narcissistic celebrity, Emmanuel Sol, would never even think to interact with a potential weapon, let alone make a cut on his perfectly smooth skin. Yet Anton, who was destined to emulate his archetype’s behavior, drew blood and stared at the crimson patch in fascination.

Rude

Attached: bullshit.png (1048x769, 60K)

I'd suggest editing your document in a format that doesn't look anything like a printed book as you have it here. Also, use a non serif font, it's easier for your eyes to read on a screen. If you make your rough draft look too much like a finished product, you'll fool yourself into thinking it's more finished than it actually is.

Read Crash by Ballard.

Seriously though. Its garbage.

shouldn't it be his mothers name was mary?

use more contractions

it's tuesday instead of the day is tuesday

I like pulled off his own face over ripped, more impactful because it's less impactful

I'm awake. I'm floating in liquid. It's moving and I can feel it against my bare skin. I can hear the whir of a motor underneath me. How do I know what a motor is?

My eyes are closed but I can see the light through them, I open my eyes. I can't see anything, I'm blind. The light hurts my eyes and I squint and turn away from it, gradually it fades, it still gives me a headache, but I can see, sort of.

I can see people dressed in bulky white suits. I reach out to touch one of them and my hand bumps into a barrier. I jerk back and a sudden searing pain fills my body, I try to scream but all that comes out are bubbles, that float slowly to the surface of my tank.

I'm drowning, I panic and thrash about, I can't breathe, I'm going to die. I see some of the suits come towards me, he peers towards me and the plastic of my tank distorts his face, there's something wrong with him.

I realize I can breathe, though I don't know how. More suits are gathering around my tank but I can barely see them. I'm crying and the tears join the liquid in my tank, I wonder if they might contaminate it. I feel around the back of my head, where most of the pain is coming from, I feel something hard, many somethings.

I twist around, thick wires are trailing out of my head and down into the floor. The suits are talking to each other now I think, I can't hear what they are saying. One of them is waving his hands, he must be upset. I can see there are other tanks outside of my prison, what I see disturbs me, young men and women floating naked like me, I can't see all the details because of the plastic but they don't look healthy, they have the same wires trailing out of their head, none of them seem to be awake.

Some new people just entered, they are big and wearing dark clothes, they grab the suit who was waving his hands around and take him away, he doesn't go quietly. The suit who was peering into my tank earlier steps back and I can see there's something wrong with him and it isn't the plastic of the glass.

There's something wrong with his face, something wrong with his body. He's too tall and hunched, like his spine has been bent and stretched and lengthened, and then set again, his eyes are too small for his head and his head is too small for his bloated bulky body. Emerging from somewhere beneath his suit are of mechanical hands that seem to move with a mind of their own, some have saws attached to them, others have needles. He looks over to one of the other suits and says something.

I hear a buzzing sound and suddenly I can't move, metal restraints have entered the pod, I can hear something else too. The swish of water, I jerk against the restraints, but they merely tighten in response.

1/2

My legs aren't strong enough to keep me up, I bash my head against the tank. Nothing happens, I fall.
My vision is getting blurry, I can hear myself gasping for air. Just let me die. When I do My tank isn't very big, so I die all twisted and curled up, knees forced up towards my chest.
Outside the tank, Jonah crosses out a name on his clipboard. He wished people would stop asking him when he's going to replace it with something more modern. He peers at his clipboard; it was only Tuesday and they had already had 3 specimens awaken early. With another 5 dying of gene rejection or other causes, that made 50 this month. He'd need to ask for another batch of specimens. The dosage of sedative needed to be raised, the current rate of terminations was unacceptable. Why was he so unlucky? He worked harder than all the other researchers. How was he going to explain these losses at the next meeting? Occupied with these thoughts and others Jonah waved the orderlies forward, the sooner they cleaned up that specimen the better, he didn't like looking at them.

2/2

I'm generally comfortable sharing it privatley with anyone who goes out of their way to ask, even if I know that I'll probably recieve a negative response, so I'm honestly not sure why the prospect of sharing it here induces so much anxiety.

bump

I know I'm going to butcher saying this and end up sounding like an insensitive doofus, but if you are lucid dreaming and you come across archways or doors leading to Harlem Renaissance-contemporary poker games or dominoes, let alone musical performances, or even if you see the 1992 US men's basketball "Dream Team" practicing in a cloud-buttressed court otherwise open to infinite star fields, do not, I repeat, do not enter these places if you are of European descent. If you pause for a second to think this through carefully, your European heredity means African astral spaces will make little sense to you and may drive you insane. At the least, if you spend long enough with your consciousness projected into one of these spaces forged by African psychics, and you survive, you'll likely be unable to tolerate living in Europe. You will inexplicably seek out the dark continent, maddened by unquenchable quests, searching for a jungle's siren you may likely never find. Still, this sort of transformation is available to someone, but I caution against it, as few become conquerors and many more make the mistake of chasing a bouncing springbok or sprinting to an oasis around which strummed a distant drum beat, and quickly find themselves chased by a crowd of chalk-daubed visages that bark with great guttural gravity as each one flies past or directly through the face of your projected, and notably European, homunculus, often seeming to attempt to bite your psychic material with their ample jaws, emitting what modulated between an athletic event's hoot and post-pugilistic "Yeets," dripping in a postured baritone. Before long, one's whole field of vision would be occluded by a dense beam of these cephalic African spirits and animistic cohabitants, sensing the strange and foreign European entity and being momentarily fascinated, they understand plainly it's threatening, as most everything in Africa is inured to being threatened by Africa alone, and so it is no exercise or accident when psychogenic cannibals prey upon innocent European psychogenia that show up out of nowhere, fat, naive, used to comparatively idyllic and placid psychic spaces, and being so inured to that they present as an unwrapped chocolate bunny might to a clutch of children. Dumb or brave enough to withstand the onslaught long enough and the Watchers of Africanized astral spaces will eventually pull your homunculus' thoroughly gnawed upon orb out of the frenzy, as its a matter of pride and to see you perish would upset the balance of the already precarious extra-conscious realms. You'll be placed in a floating city festooned in aerial gardens that generate a dank nebulized ambrosia, which helps with the wait times for the lengthy administrative queue you'll find yourself restricted to as you await evaluation and arbitration by whichever pharaonic and sabaic elders are available that day, elders, who some speculate, are not, as is told to novices, human.

Across the table different fluids commingled, white of spittlebug foam and yellow of nasal sputum, hanging, dripping off the edge. The machine ululated in a semi-human voice, cracking and microphone-popping, threatening to exceed the limitations of recording capabilities. I watched this carnival of madness unpack before me, while in the close distance something rose from the last remaining sill, slowly ascending as if cranked from a windlass. Infinitesimally, peeking out of the shadows, were two hummocks white and delicate like tofu, a bare valley laid in between, wherein a lone pink bud blooms, petite and dainty with muzzling folds; the device of filth rendered into a pleasuring plaything, the excremental agent baptized and purified of its stercoraceous crumbs.

So I've posted here once about my short story and got mostly positive replies and one constructive critique. To the latter user, I took to heart what you told me about learning the rules of prepositions but sadly I don't have much time to go over these things, although I did change a few of the other things you recommended. Right now I am writing this for fun, so only later when I have time to learn English more systematically (I learned it through absorption) I will rewrite the story to be more professional/readable.

The first 3 paragraphs of the short story are in pic related, these are the paragraphs that come afterwards which I finished today.

>At that moment a wave of terror flushed through Hakim’s body, he felt helpless like a child. Quickly stepping back, Hakim tripped over the lantern and fell to the ground. He closed his eyes and began praying through the stream of tears, he dared not move. The demon howled in a voice no man nor beast or should it be "neither...nor"? could ever make, but, strangely enough, it sounded to Hakim as if it was a shriek of fear - a shriek that, instead of encroaching upon his paralyzed body, faded into the thick darkness. Tears still pouring from his eyes, Hakim smiled and exclaimed “Oh glory to Allah, oh how blessed am I…”

>Slowly opening his misty eyes Hakim saw a flame burning brightly at the edge of his feet, right where the lantern lay broken. He quickly pulled his legs back and, while lifting himself up, had his gaze fixed on the fire in fascination. Whatever kind of fuel was inside the discount lantern it held the fire in its place, which appeared to be almost static if not for the flickering of its hairs So what I'm trying to say here is that besides its "top" the fire pretty much didn't move. Is the wording here clear enough or do you think it's confusing/awkward to use "hairs"?. His only source of light was gone, but staying wasn’t an option either, “Allah will protect me, he helped me this far, he has a plan here” he reassured himself. Wasting no time, Hakim quickly began gathering his scattered things before the fire spread to the rest of the tent. As he put his last belonging into his bag, a voice akin to thunder was heard:

>IN THE DESERT I WAIT IN THE RUINS I BURN
>METAL IS WATER
>STONE IS WAX
>FLESH IS SMOKE
>ENTER ME AND BE NO LONGER

This last paragraph is taken from a video game (a narrative driven one with pretty good writing). Just laying that out there. This paragraph and the character who says it are the only parts I'm copying.
I personally think it's a good introduction line for that character (it's supposed to be a fire demon) but I'm conflicted if I should leave it as it is in the current buildup after the danger supposedly left, change it so it's the first thing Hakim hears when he opens his eyes, or maybe even keep it for a later and use a different introductory line

Attached: 1.png (734x436, 50K)