Re: The Devil's Desire by Amber	29-May-04/3:31 PM
You could say this poem is about a woman (re)claiming and refashioning the 'belle dame' stereotype historically used to denigrate and oppress her, making it instead symbolic of archetypal feminine power (i.e., the 'Lilith' who uses whatever tools are available to her, including her much-villified sexuality, to subvert men's [physical and cultural] dominance,) in much the same way as Pat Benetar's "Love Is a Battlefield" video did in the eighties. But I bet you weren't thinking about all that, especially since third-wave feminism is mostly a joke played on women by [still-sadly-dominant] men. Also, "smokey" should be "smoky", "judgement" should be "judgment", "syrines" would be better "sirens", "facaude" should be "façade" (I think), "She" in "She grows desperately" should be lower-case, you're missing some punctuation after "fire", which is not very effective for me as a closing line, anyway, and you might consider not ending every line at the end of a sentence or clause (i.e., at a comma or period) as this is widely considered bad form. Otherwise, not bad. Better than your other one, anyway.
Re: Goodby says it all by Amber	29-May-04/3:28 PM
You shouldn't ever use "thee" or "thou" in a poem. Contrary to a widespread misconception, those terms aren't used in great classic poetry because they're particularly poetic, but because they were actually common expressions at the time of the poems' composition, like the formal and informal "you" used by present-day Spanish speakers. Anyway, writing "thee" and "thou" now just looks like you have no idea about real or recent poetry, which is always always ALWAYS written in modern English nwadays. This isn't because an oppressive poetry-dominating INSTITUTION is trying to make everybody's poetry bland and homogenous - which it isn't - so that rebelling against it is something noble and individual, like William Blake, but rather - well, because it simply looks silly to every single person on the planet. Sorry to take up so much space on your poem with my overblown comment when I don't even know if you're that passionate about it or not. But in the past dozens of people have had huge hissy fits and called me all sorts of evil names for making this same suggestion. Go figure.
Re: a comment on Suicide of the Ego by Drifting Shadow	29-May-04/3:01 PM
p.p.p.s: What's with your huge aversion to reading someone else's poems? Have you mistaken this site for some horrific, imaginary blackfog'spoemranker.com? Well, let me tell you something, mister: even the most rampaging egotist on this site (i.e., horus8) spends a couple of minutes every day looking at, voting, and commenting on other users' poetry. After all, that's what this site is about - though you, who've in your year on poemranker commented on exactly two poems which weren't your own and voted on something like thirty, seemed to have missed that memo. Or, perhaps, you're simply one of the fifty people who come here each week, post their four-poem limit, read five poems and post useless laudatory comments on the four that are exactly like their own, get bored (because let's face it, poems that are exactly like your own are pretty boring when they're not your own,) and vanish after a few days - leaving some plummy rant about how poemranker's no good for getting honest, constructive criticism and dooming succeeding generations of poemranker users to pick through your soggy aftermath (in the form of periodic randoms) forever. By which I mean, someone who's full to brimming of his own plummy self. Now, please, hurry out of here again with this 'buddha-like, I've disintegrated my ego' bullshit. You're bound to anyway, and I'm bored to death already by your babble. black fog: This must mean I won. zodiac: Whatever gets you off. black fog: Ha-ha! I'm the winner! Look, everyone! He conceded! I won this stirring intellectual debate! He knew he couldn't face my insinuations of sexual disfunction and subtle arts of manipulation which, like the great Kwai Chang Kane himself, I deploy effortlessly and beguilingly. Everyone: Bugger the fuck off. p.p.p.p.s. Who's fooled whom? I'm a chimp trained to approximate human typing.
Re: Waking by wilco	29-May-04/2:52 PM
days should be day's. You knew that, I'm sure. Drop the semicolon after breath. Change everything after headboard. Up to that point, I thought it was pretty good.
Re: a comment on Suicide of the Ego by Drifting Shadow	29-May-04/4:43 AM
1- http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.jsp?id=93667 2- http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.jsp?id=98887 3- http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.jsp?id=99678 4- No. 5- Did you miss the part about how those four people are now in the Poemranker Embarassment Hall of Fame? 6- If you don't believe in order, then how can you believe in any kind of real argument? Oh, I see, you mean we should just take turns knocking our heads against entirely separate walls. 7- Nope. 8- This has been suggested here before. 9- Nope. And I'm married, while you're a fake-o ponytailed wanna-be guru failing to pick up trashy illiterate women with patently-fake cock-and-bull like "I'm educated in psychology." 10- Because this "conversation" is already nine-tenths of the way to complete pointlessness as it is. By the time I finish this comment, I have no doubt, it will be all the way there. 11- Great. You've still added nothing new to anything. 12- I'm all for ya, kid. http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.jsp?id=94210 13- Bow'ls. 14- Jesus.
Re: a comment on I love you by AskittlesK	28-May-04/8:29 PM
I'm not saying it seems like "silly angst" to you. Of course not. And I'm certainly not denying that your poems feel big to you. That's not my point. My suggestion is totally about formatting - about putting the things in your poem into interesting contexts, like you're telling a story, rather than merely blathering about how you feel. You see how that would be more interesting to a reader than the blather? Okay! Now, by "important events" I mean - someone (especially the main character) dies. Do not include any death, which is still a pretty rare event in our country, (though if your only source of information was poemranker poetry, you'd think practically nothing else happened here.) EXCEPTION: If he or she dies from being shot by a desert-town posse, then it's okay; - the narrator/main character wounds him or herself, or someone else; - the narrator/main character realizes that giving the precious gift of his/her virtue to some complete loser was a bad idea; - the narrator screams at anyone or thing, especially parents, exes, and silence; - the narrator cries; - the narrator approaches a metaphorical void or mirror. Certainly, other things - interesting things! important things! - have to happen in your life besides these. You have to have a normal day at school; you have to go on vacation, or to the bathroom, or down the street. I'm don't want to give you any more ideas about what some interesting events may be, because I'd like to see what you think of by yourself. But I'm tremendously excited that you've not simply screamed me off your poem. If you don't mind, I'm taking that for a sign that you're considering my suggestion. Excellent! Please, please do give it a shot! Maybe it would help if you thought of writing a poem as something like putting on a play: it's not enough that there's an idea and meaning, etc., there's got to be action to keep us in the audience watching. (NB-don't write your poem like an actual play, that's just a metaphor.) Um. Okay. Thanks - zodiac.
Re: a comment on Suicide of the Ego by Drifting Shadow	28-May-04/7:00 PM
1) "see you aint got a clue because you think in balck [sic] and white" means nothing to me. I happen to think the basis of all "clues" is perceiving things as clearly as possible. Who wouldn't? Oh. You. Well, if you want to argue some anti-intellectual nonsense, by all means go ahead, but I should point out to you that you're the one who already looks half-gay and incapable of spelling such a simple word as black. 2) "you think too much because you dont trust your own judgement" - ibid. And does that even begin to make sense? No. How the hell else would I arrive at judgments other than by thinking them? Wait - maybe if I just took the judgments of others, such as Jesuses or fictional shaolin monks? But no, that would be the height of not trusting my own judgment. 3) To say "I don't know anything at all and neither does anyone else" is bosh to the max. Of course I know simple things, such as my address and how to tie my shoes (at least, by the third attempt.) One of the things I know with a reasonable degree of certainty is what a crap poem looks like, having written literally hundreds of them myself and read thousands on poemranker (while you, let's be clear, haven't read any.) 5) Stop worrying about whether you can "keep coming back and laughing at me," and start confabulating some way to make a lick of sense and not look like some kind of, I don't know, irrationally laughing guy. 6) Great.
Re: a comment on Suicide of the Ego by Drifting Shadow	28-May-04/6:50 PM
RULE #4: Please make an effort to spell/grammatize correctly. Quaint as it seems, I find language to be the only thing that makes everything mean anything. If you're going to continue to write in misspelled pidgen gobbledygook, I'll get huffy and go home.
Re: a comment on Suicide of the Ego by Drifting Shadow	28-May-04/6:47 PM
You are roughly the fifth person on this site to claim to have me "running in circles," "up against a wall," "bent over with my pants down," or some other such groundless boast. The first four are currently wailing and gnashing their teeth in my own specially-constructed "outer darkness," by which I mean poetry dot com. So, sure I'd like to play, but you have to first learn the rules. RULE #1: Always format your comments in numbered lists. Otherwise we won't know who's winning. RULE #2: If, say, I make a point, your comment should answer that point in the precisest possible terms. None of this galloping off wildly with your breeches half-breeched. For both our conveniences' sake, the points shall take the form of numbered lists. COROLLARY #1 TO RULE #2: This means when I suggest you take a look at the poems and other whatnot posted by the people you're making flolloping assumptions about, you might seriously consider doing so. Failure to respond to existing points or to introduce new points in a reasonable manner will result in the addition of one GAY POINT to your GAYNESS QUOTIENT for each infraction. RULE #3: You're a cod. That is all.
Re: a comment on I love you by AskittlesK	28-May-04/6:29 PM
Please don't listen to him, cuddlytiger. I'm shaped exactly like crystal lane swift but with wider hipbones.
Re: a comment on I love you by AskittlesK	28-May-04/6:26 PM
Um.
Re: a comment on Sir Magnedrol vs. The Dragon (part 1) by Phalkon	28-May-04/6:23 PM
re: "oh, and things can be 'dulled' without be 'non-sharp'" Are you a robot programmed to approximate human speech? Congratulations, you're doing swell.
Re: Child of Troy by Caducus	28-May-04/4:52 AM
If you experienced some massive head wound, causing your capacity for thought to become moderately impaired, do you suppose you would believe MORE in God, or LESS? Thanks - Curious in Schenectady, NY
Re: a comment on The Folded Ways Your Eyes Cave by horus8	28-May-04/4:36 AM
Isn't the 'folded way' only one of many ways that her eyes cave? How many ways can one's eyes cave that can be described as 'folded'?
Re: Horror Film by Jeremi B. Handrinos	27-May-04/10:21 PM
One of your best in a while. "Wheel chair knight of no table" needs work. I get it now, and would've had an easier time if you'd made wheelchair one word. Maybe hyphenate "knight-of-no-table" as well. Maybe not.
Re: johnny dowd by the codeine kid	27-May-04/10:18 PM
Have you ever read this poem out loud?
Re: Get it straight by tre	27-May-04/10:12 PM
Practically every single line of this is wrong. Not surprising, considering your source.
Re: I love you by AskittlesK	27-May-04/10:08 PM
I have a suggestion and would you please do me the favor of taking it halfway seriously? The suggestion is this: write a poem in which something happens. It shouldn't be something very big (i.e., death) or important (ibid.), just anything - some action from beginning to end. I'm not asking you to change your whole whatever, just take a crack at it and see if it feels better than being endlessly mocked for posting these same silly angst poems. What've you got to lose, really? Please, I'm being utterly serious right now, having just watched a very touching movie in which something very moving happened to a lonely man who didn't do - something I can't remember, or maybe didn't catch in the first place, since I was bawling childlike tears from the first scene on. Wait, that didn't come out right. I mean to say that I'm not such a monster as the people on this site would have you believe. I DO believe in constructive criticism, and this is it. If you want to improve your writing, you'll try my idea. Consider it an experiment - like broadening your horizons, or a homework assignment from a kindly science teacher whom you've secretly had a crush on all year. Thanks so much for reading this far. I look forward to seeing what you can do. -zodiac
Re: a comment on Fighting before bed by zodiac	27-May-04/9:45 PM
Adjective. As in "the still waters," or something such. This is, to my recollection, the third time I've been called on using still as an adjective. Doesn't everybody do that?
Re: a comment on In Love as in Love by Everyone	27-May-04/9:35 PM
Are you blind? It's CLS.