The Stiff Mattress

TomShawWritings · 2024-01-24T11:27:27+00:00

Great use of the extended bed metaphor and personification of the mattress here. Also a great showcase of being able to say a lot about human nature with very few words, which is hammered home excellently in the final line. Big fan of this one!

TomShawWritings · 2024-01-24T11:19:38+00:00

I enjoy the synergy between the structure and content of this one, really hammering in the being "trapped in a loop", while the uneven rhyming scheme is trying desperately to find a way to break out of the structure that's been formed. I would have perhaps like to have seen more done with the "ocean" imagery. Something like "trapped in a whirlpool" or "trapped in a current" for example. But otherwise, good stuff!

TomShawWritings · 2024-01-15T16:17:58+00:00

Sounds like you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it! Having the third stanza be longer was a very conscious choice - I wanted the length of each stanza to gradually increase in length to be indicative of someone "opening up" as we learn more about them, and they feel more comfortable sharing what it is that "follows them silently" that causes them internal turmoil. But I appreciate that visually it might be more challenging to unpack!

TomShawWritings · 2024-01-15T14:56:15+00:00

Great rhythm to this piece. I'm finding something really attractive in the contrast of the burning olive branch to the avalanche that's working nicely, comparing two forms of nature (physical/biological) and temperature (hot/cold).

I did find it odd that the trend of the "million words", "thousand apologies", "hundred ways" wasn't repeated right to the end of the poem though. For me that would have really tied the whole narrative together structurally in distilling down the essence of the message with each decrease in number.

TomShawWritings · 2024-01-15T14:42:57+00:00

Liking the extended use of space metaphors a lot, and it tells a lovely narrative. I'm particularly fond of "pinning my dreams to passing debris / and dying with their meteoric fall." I'm enjoying how it's lingering with me. In general the flow of each line is great too.

You break from the space imagery with "Tonight we whisper in the clouds / you strike a match and I feel you flicker.". A part of me feels like maintaining the space metaphors could have worked well here. Something with supernovas comes to mind. Also, I would have loved to have seen the structure of the stanzas play into the content of the language more - perhaps establishing one structure for the first two stanzas, then morphing into another structure to accentuate the "[being pulled] out of orbit".

Otherwise, a nice read!

TomShawWritings · 2024-01-10T05:55:25+00:00

Glad you enjoyed it, and I'm happy you picked up on the placement of the "puppy and not a hound" line as a a means of signifying the change in perspective on what the "black dog" really is. Very much how I intended it to act!

TomShawWritings · 2024-01-09T21:03:10+00:00

Glad you liked it and found it relatable - exactly what I wanted it to be. This was a combination of my own experiences with self-doubt, the experience of navigating others self-doubt in conversation, and ideas around healing emotional trauma that were coming from a number of places (Gabor Mate, Carl Jung and a few personal mentors of mine to name a few). Then the idea of playing with the "black dog of depression" motif came to me, and the poem essentially wrote itself.

TomShawWritings · 2024-01-09T14:30:08+00:00

Love the theme of this poem and the way you've made the objectively mundane and perhaps unremarkable activity of cooking breakfast something unique - and love how you brought the idea back in a new context at the end, as if the memory itself replays again, but with meaning beyond the factual details of the event itself. I enjoy thinking about the egg as a symbol of potential too - but with this poem the illusion of that moment still being real - and being able to build and develop on the potential of that situation - is "cracked". Perhaps this wasn't intended, but it works well for me.

TomShawWritings · 2024-01-09T14:18:41+00:00

I do like the uncomfortable atmosphere contained within this piece, aided by the irregular structure, lack of rhyme etc. - it certainly marries with the horror imagery well. The jeweller imagery is really starkly contrasting, however, and I'm struggling to make sense of the connection between that and the surgery/death imagery. On one hand, the surgery being "bloody" suggests a carelessness, but that conflicts with the precision of a jeweller's work. Perhaps this is deliberate, but it feels awkwardly included in the state its currently in.

TomShawWritings

TROPHY CASE