How many centimetres are your eyebags?
Mine's nine. Mine's ten, I beat you.
She steps in, and clearing her throat, declares
"We could easily study all week without sleeping."
They look at each other, and solemnly agree,
sitting back at their desks with the textbooks open
Back to their daily rites of passage.

Firstly, I am struck. I enjoyed this poem a great deal.

Bellow are my humble suggestions:

We wear our strands of white hair
like badges. Searching through masses
of black for that one piece of evidence
of hard work.
^A great concept! and a great first sentence. but the end bit of this stanza tripped me up:

'of black...of evidence of hard work'

Try to varry this some. Maybe cut this sentence into a smaller sentence.

We measure our eyebags and announce
^awesome, everyone can relate to this. eyebags, good idea to put them together.

to the world how large they have
become. Eye each other and size them up.
Mine is seven centimetres. Mine's eight.
^Good tension, throw a little competition in there, it never hurt anyone. I dig the end line, and its connotation. (centimeters is spelled with the e before the r)

We compete to see who sleeps the latest
or the littlest. Two hours are the best
^'are the best' doesn't work right. Yes, I understand the line after it. Perhaps this should be broken up into two lines.

'littlest' doesn't strike a good note either.

and most coveted. Twilight hours are best
for studying.
^I like that the last line of this stanza seems random but adds evidence to the supposed age.

We become future leaders like they
always wanted us to. We rule the country.
^they / always wanted us to.' is dull. 'trained us to' 'forced us to' anything, give a good verb and you will have a better line.

We have power. Our hard earned brilliance
^'we have power.' - We are power. < just a thought.

shines brightly like a diamond-- cut, rigid, hard.
^hard is a weak adjective. perhaps 'cut. rigid.' would work better. I don't like that there is no reference to a diamond or anything else that relates to such in the poem, thus making it random imagery rather than consistent imagery. But this is only a small tic.

We become the future leaders
^Period.

And we mould children into our clones.
^cut the 'And' and capitalize the 'we' - bold statements deserve to stand alone.

I enjoyed reading this! I hope everything I had to say makes sense and is of good use!

Keep writing!



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onewordatatime has made some interesting points (many valid), but i will dsiagree on two:

1. the first stanza is fine - i like the way the last line works.

2. 'littlest' i feel IS a good counterpoint, but i wud cut the word 'the' to become:

"We compete to see who sleeps the latest
or littlest. Two hours are the best"

Feel free to come check out my stuff and leave spurious comments!
[link]

Thank you! I'm at the point in my writing... career, for lack of a better word, where I just need someone to sink their claws into my writing and rip it to shreds. It's a nice experience, (and also something which I wish happened more often). Thanks for the tips, I'll try and work on it. Also, I think the british spelling is centimetre instead of meter.

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Write prose? ~simplyprose

thanks for the comment!

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Write prose? ~simplyprose