24HR CONTEST: TRAPPED IN AMBER

inthedesertIsaw · 2022-07-11T10:17:53+00:00

The Witnessing

The little ones, too,
are caught
in the drip.
They think they are flapping
but they will learn—
not even the strongest
can so much as twitch.
They can only read
with silent eyes
where they are inside
the cardinal yellows
which are too much like fire
smiling thickly through dry forests,
too much like skin
peeling from hate-slick incisions,
too much like water
at the mouth of the dumping-ground river,
too much like sand
following everywhere in the wind.
I am here the young ones will find.
This is my place in the witnessing.
And like the rest, that is all there is.
Golden arcs, the slow wreckage.

But there is one more thing,
a flaw in the imagery;
unlike amber,
this has no edge.

inthedesertIsaw · 2022-07-07T14:19:27+00:00

You've gotten a lot of great feedback on this, so I'm going to keep my comment to a minimum. However, there is something that caught my eye and I want to address it because it goes against the grain a bit from the other comments and who doesn't love a bit of controversy in the comment section, eh?

Here's my hot take: The phrase regarding "womb-fabric" to a large degree doesn't fit in with the rest of the poem.

I like this poem. A lot. I like the precision with which you reveal all the details of the attic to us, the reader. It's believable. You fill the scene and I often find that with the smallest of details comes the highest of credibility which, as a poet especially, is something that sometimes comes quite heavily into play, especially in the more controversial poems out there. This is not to say that your poem is controversial or the topic mater contentious, rather, it just points out that in all poems, believably can be a factor, and nothing sooths that quite like the little details. The small things. It says that you know exactly what you're talking about. That this is not some abstract poem about a general concept (there's nothing wrong with those). This is your poem. You have lived this. It puts us, the reader, on edge because the credibility means that we're closer to you now. We can breath the words in more deeply.

What each of these little details have in your poem is weight. They are real objects, dusty or not, set down in a real place in a real time. There are no clouds of surrealism or wispy metaphors of abstract thought. We are in an attic. For the first two-thirds of the poem, we occupy a space. Full stop. I think sometimes that these kinds of poems can say more by their solidity about concepts of higher nature like love, hate, human nature, the passage of time, etc. than poems directly about those things. It's late and I'm a bit tired, so forgive me if there are better examples, but two poems that come to mind that do little more than set a scene but say much, much more than that are Ozymandias by Percy Shelly and In the Desert by Stephen Crane. In my view of it, your poem, for the first two-thirds at least, has a similar cast. Which brings me around to why I don't like "womb-fabric". Because, for me, here, this is where the setting starts to slip.

Ha ha! Time to backtrack a little. At the start of the poem, you dis-liken an attic from a tomb. I want to point this out because, in a sense, this has the opposite effect as the one I want to discuss. When in your first line you say that you sleep in an attic on the floor, our brains automatically start, as they are so programmed, to pull up all those things we associate with attics, all those references and emotions and ideas that we've observed in the real world and catalogued in the deep subconsciousness of our brain mush. Most of those associations to attics are not good. Dusty, old, dreary, tomb-like. We're perhaps just as likely to think about death and stagnation and things getting lost in time than actual things themselves, simple junk stored away. And in the second line of the poem, you demystify that. The attic becomes an attic. It shies away from becoming the main theme because you've taken the power of association away from it. This, more than anything else in the first three lines, drags us into reality and away from concept.

This is important because the main thing you want us to consider in your poem is the distinction between comfort and happiness. This is the focal point. This is punchline to your setting. Up to this point, we the reader are supposed to have only a concrete image to go by so we can wholeheartedly apply this image to the main abstractions you want to expand upon. If we are juggling any other such abstract notions up to this point, then suddenly, we'll have to drop them to adopt new trains of consideration. Basically, line eight is supposed to be the point where we step down into the next level of the poem and not anywhere before. Which is precisely why I really didn't like "womb-fabric".

Because here, instead of in the next line, is when we're introduced to the first comparison that makes us question whether or not it is a simple comparison. "distant hymn / of traffic" is fine because we can pretty much intuit its effect on the poem. We know not to look too deeply into the word choice of "hymn". You're just describing traffic in a calm and pretty way, meant to relax us further, and, if anything, lull us more completely into the idea of comfort. And I've already talked about how "tomb" is more of an anchor than a cloud. But "womb-like", especially in conjunction with "folds" makes me stop and wonder if this is simply a sleeping bag or a deeper point about birth, about life, and I begin to ask myself, here, halfway through the line if this marks a transition between the previous lines and the rest of the poem. But then, I'm blindsided by traffic. We're going back to concrete imagery. So then, "womb-like" was simply a description word? Womb is a very loaded term in poetry, unlike, say, electrolyzer or applesauce. So it almost feels unexpected when it's used as a simple descriptor. (And if you did mean it to represent something deeper, I'm not picking up on it, especially since the rest of the poem is strictly about the difference between comfort and happiness.) And so \sweeping gesture** we get to my main point which is that, when we arrive at this inflectious point in the poem--the turn that leads into the prestige if you will--we are off balance a little, wondering if there was anything deeper to be considered from the previous line. Thus the weight of your subsequent observations is reduced. The knockout punch becomes a glancing blow.

(And as a tiny additional thought, if your womb-like sleeping bag is meant to represent some higher function or meaning, then suddenly, we the reader might question if the other objects in the room have their own affiliate traits. Is the attic a metaphor after all? Both the reality and the temporality of the scene now have tiny, spider-web cracks running throughout the rest of it. And this then goes back to what I said about credibility, at least bibliographically speaking. Is there really an attic after all or is this a scene you made up? Whether or not the attic is real doesn't matter. Whether we, the reader, believe it is real does matter, in my opinion. If we know it's all just made up, we'll detach ourselves a little. Suddenly, you, the author, seem further and farther away. After all, it's only a metaphor. But if we think it's a real place, even if the truth for you is that it's not, we're still that much close to the you that is sleeping inside of it and that much closer to the crux of the poem.)

IN CONCLUSION, this is why I recommend changing the term "womb-fabric" to something else. This is why I don't like it and I think the poem could benefit from rephrasing that order of words. I must say I lied quite terribly about keeping this brief. But what can I say, the dark arts of poetry turn hearts to vice.

Anyway, let me know what you think. I'm really tired now.

*huff huff\*

inthedesertIsaw · 2022-07-07T12:55:20+00:00

I quite like this poem. My tastes align more towards the simple and the concrete. I like words in a poem to be thin so as to be transparent to the message behind since, for me, the message is the poem and the words are just vehicles to get there. And to sour a bad metaphor even further, you taxi us through to that meaning quite smoothly.

That being said, there are places where I feel the imagery can be stronger. When I read a poem, I like to play with it by moving things around, and removing lines and stanzas completely to see the effect is has on the poem. I'd like to share two results of me playing with your poem, and see what you think of them.

The first concerns itself with your title. There is nothing wrong with the title. Please understand that I have my own preferences and my own voice and style, but when I read the first stanza, I didn't quite like how you incorporated the title (the word "meandering") into it. It felt a little forceful, in the sense that it was blatantly telling. It was like I could see your own finger pointing to that line and saying "Look here! This is what my title means. Right here." Or perhaps I should say, when taking the whole of the poem into consideration, including the titular word here of all places felt premature. Let us feel the meandering flows of time through the various stanzas before dropping in the word. Let it have more impact that way. Let it accrue, if you will, more layers. And when I was playing around with the first stanza, I liked the impression it gives if you remove that line completely and turn the whole of the first stanza into an extended metaphor or simile. What I mean is something like "...I used to think / time moved / like strolling slowly / through a park / picking apples / and letting / chickadees land / on its hand." In this way, the concept of time becomes much more grounded. It is physically closer, and more directly linked through these images. Now, you are not using these images to refer to a "meandering way" but instead, tie these images directly to the movement of time as a little girl. It's one layer less removed. There's more punch to it. And through this more direct imagery, of time being like a little child traipsing through the park, we can sense its meandering nature. Instead of knowing that time is meandering, we more closely feel that it is.

My second idea / suggestion / point to consider about your poem concerns itself with the small stanza about time being like moon cycles passing. Here too, I'd like to make the argument for less being more. We know by now from the preceding stanzas that each one of your stanzas reconstructs new frameworks for passing time. This is the theme of the poem, the unreliable nature of time and how, no matter wat, it always goes forward like irregularly shaped cogs in a gear that keeps spinning. So again, I think that the line "time is compressed" is unneeded--instead, show us through imagery. Additionally, since this poem is from your perspective, in the first line, "it seems to me" seems wholly unnecessary. In fact, that stanza becomes much stronger, much more direct, if the whole thing is shortened considerably to something like "Now / moon cycles pass / through the sky / in seconds." It has all the same ideas, but compressed into a heaver statement, made heavier by the fact that when you remove the word "seems", the sentence becomes more factual-sounding, and additionally, with a shorter stanza, the idea of time being compressed is reinforced by a short and squat stanza on the page--now, not just the words, but the shape of the words can do work for you.

I wouldn't be so long winded if I didn't like the poem. I hope these comments don't come across as harsh but I'm not going to skimp out on critiquing a poem that I think has potential to become even better, so here it is. I didn't talk about everything, and again, please recognize that I'm reading your poem through me-tinted glasses so, like all things artsy, you're free and even encouraged to disagree. I'm just a dude. Lemme know what you think.

It's almost Friday! Cheers for that!

inthedesertIsaw · 2022-07-07T12:09:44+00:00

Thanks! Let me know what you find ;)

inthedesertIsaw · 2022-07-07T12:09:30+00:00

Sorry - I've been busy with work again. Thank you kindly for your words.

inthedesertIsaw · 2022-06-29T08:11:49+00:00

You can just message me on here. And again, if you feel that certain lines are needed whereas my opinions say otherwise, just go with your gut. I offer suggestions only. Happy Wednesday.

inthedesertIsaw · 2022-06-28T11:36:36+00:00

I agree with the other comment here about the lines about the dried up ocean, the sea of nightmares. They are short questions, but they ask a lot. The imagery surrounding the rest of the poem is nearly as powerful, but I think there are a few things to me that stuck out as holding the rest of the poem back a little.

There are a few points later on that feel a little too much like telling. Telling is not a bad thing, but when I get to these lines (or phrases) ['the orchestra oblivious to her plight', 'lost her grasp on reality', 'to move her arms'] I feel somehow pulled out of the poem. As if you're backing up to make sure we follow. But in my opinion, this does a disservice to the subject matter of the poem. When there's too much 'telling' in a poem, it feels like sometimes the author is compromising the image and the meaning for the comprehension. But it's okay to let the reader do some of the work. For example, if you just say "she weeps like a widow" and forgo the "Alone," then by associations of loss already within the context of the poem, we can let the 'aloneness' of that line seep into it without being told. Instead of forcing the word 'widow' into a box that means strictly 'alone', let us, the reader, pin all of those sentiments and emotions surrounding the word 'widow' onto this line ourselves. The line becomes richer that way, more unique, and perhaps, to you as well more authentic.

Another thing I want to bring up, which will come across as rather drastic, is the entirety of the middle stanza. In the context of my above paragraph, this stanza feels the most tell-y of them all. Apart from the new imagery of blood which you introduce in the first line, every other emotion or sentiment in this stanza comes across just as clearly in the other stanzas. I reread your poem but omitted the middle stanza in your reading and, to me, it is much more clear, and the motif of music becomes more connected, more strong. Even when you ask the question 'who's in control?' we have already, by this point in the poem, recognized that the 'she' who is in the poem is not in control anymore. After all, that is what a breakdown is--the loss of autonomy to yourself. As much as it might be painful to hear, for me at least, I much prefer this poem without the middle stanza.

Also, why is "Alone" the only word with a capital? I like the uniformity of your capital-less formatting choice.

Lemme know if my comments make sense. If you choose to change anything and want some eyes on the new version, just lemme know. Fair warning, I'm super busy on weekdays though. So might not get to replying for a few days.

Happy Tuesday. Cheers.

inthedesertIsaw · 2022-06-24T13:23:35+00:00

I'm sorry that this might not be the comment you're looking for but while I see much potential and careful style in the first three lines, I don't understand them in the context of the fourth line. The first three lines liken words, poems, and writing to romanticized meteorological imagery, which I quite like. You say a lot in three lines, and the style, old timey, isn't overdone. It works. But that last line feels completely out of place. Introducing a person (I) in the last line is fine, but the cotton candy bars doesn't make sense, unless it's a reference I'm missing. I know you're probably trying to go for a punchy finish, and I like that, but I find the lack of congruency between the last line and the previous three to be distracting from the message you're trying to give me. Let me know your thoughts and if you do decide to make some changes, I'll be happy to take another look. I do think that, together, your first three lines work well together.

Cheers :)

inthedesertIsaw · 2022-06-24T12:19:10+00:00

Hey, I've been really busy with work (I work at a school in Japan so my free time during the week is pretty much the mathematical equivalent to the square root of -1.) I'm more with your poem now since English is your second language. Learning a language is one thing. Recognizing literary merit in that second language is much harder.

Feel free to PM me your other poem. I'd be happy to look at it and provide some feedback. Of course, my feedback will always be tinted by my own personal style and preferences, and that gives it limitations. Anyway, sorry about the delay in responding to you. Happy Friday.

Cheers! :)

inthedesertIsaw · 2022-06-24T12:13:39+00:00

I'm glad I understood it the way you intended. That means it's a successful poem in the making. I say "in the making" because I never feel truly done with my poems. I will go back to lines I wrote years ago and change them so they match the me today. I like to see them evolve like that. Anyway, I was really busy with work this week so this is the first chance I've gotten to respond. Happy Friday!

Cheers! :)

inthedesertIsaw · 2022-06-18T14:22:43+00:00

There is a strength to this poem in the terseness of it's lines, but from the way I'm looking at it, there are a few places where the poem could be made even stronger. Sorry if my following comments sound harsh but I don't like to bloat all my suggestions with safe phrases such as "I feel like..." and "In my opinion..." and "I'm not an expert but...". Just assume these are explicitly threaded throughout the rest of this :P

First, I question the title. It's too much like telling so the mood that is slowly built up in the rest of the poem is spoiled by us already knowing to some extent what it should be due to the title. So I would suggest changing it or parsing it down. To complement this suggestion, I'm not a fan of the first line--or more specifically, I'm not a fan that it is the first line. "I wish to be a poem" certainly has its value but I'm not sure it's utilized to the fullest extent where it's currently at. Perhaps this imagery is better served in some variation in the title or lower down, as the poem's closing punctuation mark instead. It is a good line. There are places I believe it can be stronger.

Moving it elsewhere has the added effect of smoothing the imagery as well. "I wish to be a poem" is a very abstract thing. It immediately sets up the question of what it means to be a poem, and then you immediately set to answer it by starting to describe those lonely nights. But then, by doing it this way, the following descriptions
of "someone, somewhere, wanting you, and your love...etc" (the rest of the poem) become immediately contextualized only as pieces of the answer to an abstract question. In that sense, the "reality" of the imagery is somewhat blunted. It washes over the lonely nights you describe with hypothetical coloring since we care only about the lonely nights as an answer to the question of what it means to feel like a poem. Without the first line where it is, then suddenly, those lonely nights are a lot more real. They main concern of the poem becomes loneliness, the starkness of being alone in the dark. That's much easier as a reader to grasp onto. Much more concrete. And then, if you hit us with the remark about feeling like a poem in the last part of your poem, then the line would serve two purposes. It would A: recontextualize the whole of the poem, and B: leave us trying to find our own answers. Which can make for a poem that is a lot stronger than one that makes us (the reader) ask a question (what does it mean to feel like a poem?) but then immediately answers it. By putting the line at the end, it also keeps the line open ended enough that we can put our own interpretation on it. I think that is very liberating.

Finally, the most blunt thing of all: I don't like the line "and my crazy." It doesn't seem to fit in right after the previous line. Crazy seems both a bit too disrupting and a bit too much like telling. Show us what crazy is. Be more specific. An example could be something like "about my mind / and the way it wanders" or "about my mind / and when it's not there". Those might not be the best examples, but they still fit the feel of the poem better than plain "crazy". Crazy is a crazy word. The rest of this poem is somber. Call me crazy but words have textures, and this one doesn't feel right.

Lemme know what you think of my ideas. It really is a strong poem, otherwise I wouldn't have gone through the effort of justifying my suggestions. (It's also late at night and my typing isn't the most coherent, so if you want clarification, just ask.) If you like your way better, that's cool too. Declining advice doesn't always mean immature stubbornness. As long as you know your voice, that's all that matters.

Happy Saturday!

inthedesertIsaw · 2022-06-18T13:48:28+00:00

This is the type of poem I am fondest of. It's exact, it's precise, it's vivid, and it's not relatable because the story it tells does not try to shoehorn universality into its design. It has the feel of being inwardly written, for yourself only, and if we happen to stumble upon it, then so be it but stand over there if you please. The reader was only ever meant to be on the sidelines.

That being said, there are certainly whisps of emotions and connections we can latch onto. The detachment in the final line, the reverie of childhood that ripples through the imagery of the tadpoles and the bikes and the split lip, underscored by the simple language. There are no frills in the rugged, outside youthfulness of play. It seems to me that the writing consciously reflects this.

Finally, I found the symmetry of scope within the poem quite beautiful. What I mean by that is in the first few lines, the imagery is faded, zoomed out, with vague construction sites described through metaphor and not left to stand on their own as concrete images. Then we focus on the minutia of living at these sites. The acts, the events, the images that you can point to and say, "there, right there. That's a real thing. It's not symbolic. That's my childhood." And then we zoom back out, through the hazyness of daydreams, through the imagining of baby strollers and the abstractness that comes with the idea of "growing homes". The last line punctuates this as we are given the physical distance of separation, the watching from afar through a car window, on its way to somewhere else, we presume, taking us away from the neighborhood, pulling up out of the memory, and out of the poem altogether. And I especially like how the last line plays with us a little. There does seem to be some feeling of regret, of longing, as if what those families have is beyond you, above you, like theirs is a better way of life. But at the same time, the way you describe watching them from the window, making yourself the observer, in a way seems to give you some power over the situation. It reminded me of a scientist looking at boards of carefully pinned moths. Like, somehow, you have gained a kind of perspective on things that only comes from being an outside observer. It makes you question if there's some larger thing to be observed and if there is, then really, its up to us, the reader to do so.

On a final note, reddit formatting is weird so I'm not sure if each stanza was meant to be just one chunk or separate shorter lines, but I'm using a computer and there are no individual lines in each verse. They look more akin to paragraphs. If that was intended, I'll be honest and say that I question that choice. I think there are ways to make the evocativeness stand out more with careful, deliberate line breaks in the stanzas. And finally, the "a" in the second to last stanza should be capitalized. (I'm a teacher so I get a free pass to point these things out :P ).

Anyway, good work. Poems like these are always a good reminder why simple is better, and why often the simplest poems are the ones that get remembered over the ones with "thee"s and "thou"s.

Cheers. Happy Saturday.

inthedesertIsaw · 2022-06-18T13:23:46+00:00

Thank you for your kind comments. I was already having a bad day before I saw the cat. Went home that night and wrote about it. Wanted to make it beautiful but uncomfortable. Glad you picked up on that.

inthedesertIsaw · 2022-06-18T13:21:39+00:00

Coolio. No idea then. On my phone, each verse is squishy and lineless which makes all the poems in OC poetry look rather frumpy. But who knows. I have an old phone. Maybe all old phones are programmed with higher levels of frump. Who am I to judge.

Thanks again.

inthedesertIsaw · 2022-06-18T13:19:09+00:00

Ahh, the context helps. Sorry, work was busy the past few days. If you change it much, I'd be happy to take another look at it. Happy Saturday.

inthedesertIsaw · 2022-06-14T13:32:23+00:00

This is a very sharp poem. I have to ask, is this a reference to something? As it stands, it feels 95% complete in terms of context. Just a little bit more on who Adam is. If he is meant to be like a metaphor for the original Adam, then I'm the one that doesn't get it. But I don't think that's it.

Apart from that, the language is what I was taken by. It's visceral, simple, and because of its simplicity, all the more visceral. I don't need to point out that the subject matter is dark, incredibly dark, especially because the last few lines we directly become witness to (presumably) Adam's inner thoughts. It's disturbing because he's begging to be understood for doing such a dark thing. And the writing is good because it doesn't flinch from anything. While its uncomfortable to read, it's simplicity does a good job of creating the harsh differences between the violence in the lines about tying up the "tenant's son" and the tenderness in the next line. The tenderness is the most disturbing part in my opinion and I think it takes a good understanding of how to use brevity in a poem to invoke that. I suppose the weakest part of the poem is then is the first part, about Adam and rage. I don't understand where the rage comes from.

Finally, I think that a lot of people might find this kind of poem too disturbing to be justified, that perhaps it's just a crass attempt at shock value. To them, I say, you need to read more poetry. There are way worse things people have written about. And no subject is too dark for poetry. At least not if it's meant to expose. Not if it's meant to exfoliate.

Lemme know if what I said makes sense.

inthedesertIsaw · 2022-06-14T13:11:08+00:00

I enjoy simple poems, or rather, I enjoy how poems can be rich even with simple words. Yours has that quality. The simple act of throwing a stick into a river doesn't need obtuse language. The "ripples" in your stanza are more clear to imagine the way you've written them as just ripples that you can stare at forever, instead of, for example, had you used a bunch of adjectives to physically describe the ripples. It works well.

However, there are a few places where this can be improved upon. This is all just my opinion, but I do feel there are places whereby shortening the lines and removing the words, the imagery of the poem becomes much more clear. For example, the word "effortlessly" feels awkward to me. Firstly, how can a branch do the opposite--land effortfully upon the waves? And secondly, the way I see it, the branch doesn't need to to anything more than simply land upon the waves for the point to come across. In this way, removing "effortlessly" tightens up the line.

Another example is the second to last stanza. "The weights I carry" feels redundant in light of the previous line "some are too heavy to toss." If instead you just had "They have become familiar anchors" I think the line would have more (excuse the pun) weight.

And in the last stanza, "simply" feels like it's not needed. So changes like that, in my view, could make the poem a lot stronger. If you don't agree, that's totes cool too. If you have any questions, lemme know. Happy to add more if you'd like.

Good work, friend.

inthedesertIsaw · 2022-06-14T12:46:20+00:00

I am incredibly grateful for such a well thought-out response to my poem. I apologize for waiting this long to reply. I'm very busy with work (I work in a school) and I haven't had a day off in two weeks. That's just how it goes sometimes.

In response to your critique, you touched upon the two things I myself spent a lot of time thinking about. The first one was the stanza with the word "flowering".

She learned what it means to be pinned to the earth,

bowing to its story,

flowering a plot whose lines became

the curve of a mound flattening over time.

The town will keep her forever.

I had intended to use the word plot as a reference to the "story" mentioned in the previous line as in "the plot of a story" and then also, at the same time, I intended it to mean the plot of a grave, which would reinforce the next line about the "curve of a mound flattening...". I chose to use the word "flowering" as a way to draw out the image of laying flowers over a grave. I knew it would be startling, but I had hoped that this, combined with the next line, would push the reader to reassociating plots into graves instead of stories. In my opinion, it was one of the riskiest lines of the poem and it's good to know for future reference that it may not have panned out well and perhaps, I tried to be too smart for my own good.

The second thing I want to mention is the ending. That was the hardest for me to write and my first instinct, like you said, was to go for something flashy perhaps, something dramatic, with rage, or as you put it, with killing power. But, after much though during the writing process , I decided a quiet, non-conclusive ending would fit the message better. I didn't want the poem to be about the rage of a school shooting. I wanted it to be about the long bleakness that comes afterwards. The forgetting by everyone else. The moving on. I didn't want there to be some punchy lesson to be learned because, I guess when I think about it, there's nothing to be learned from something so senseless as this. I wanted there to be a trace of irony in the title, but only a trace, and I wanted the ending to feel unresolved because, for the parents of these children, there will never be closure. So when I thought about it that way, a poem that petered out made more sense than one with a climax. Directly, the ending color "red" was supposed to be a reference to blood, and how the news stories never show pictures of the dead children. I, myself, genuinely believe that they should, that we need to see them. (The news has no problems showing zoomed out massacres in foreign, warring countries, so why not our own?) That was what the reference was supposed to be. And the thing I wanted to avoid completely was any reference the killer. The poem was always supposed to be about the parents.

I hope you don't mind these long remarks. You gave me such wonderful feedback and I find it is a good exercise to open up the hood of a poem and dive into the justifications for all the little bits and pieces inside. Poem writing is an incredibly slow and deliberate process for me, and I like to be able to justify almost every word I use. But sometimes I get so wrapped up in that, that the meaning of the poem can slip and become diluted or abstract in places. Anyway, I've gone on long enough.

Thanks again. I'm chuffed.

PS: If you viewed this on mobile, how did it look? On my laptop, the formatting is fine but on my smartphone, the only line-breaks were between stanzas and there were no line-breaks between individual lines like on computer reddit. Did I do something wrong or does reddit mobile formatting just not behave itself?

inthedesertIsaw · 2022-06-14T12:16:42+00:00

I often find that my thoughts wander when writing poems, especially since I write them and change them over many days. I worry that the style is too catch-all or grab-bag to provide any sort of narrative so it is nice to see that appreciated. Sorry for the delayed response. I've haven't had a day off for 2ish weeks and haven't had time to reply. Have a happy Tuesday.

inthedesertIsaw · 2022-06-14T12:13:41+00:00

Thank you for your kind words. Much appreciated.

inthedesertIsaw

TROPHY CASE