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blueintheface

NEED CRITICISM!!

Winnipeg sits trapped
in dirty snow
and dirty politics.

Salt spills from trucks
in the night, those
yellow lights flashing, dilating
our drunken pupils
and driving the broken streets
that the City Council still hasnt fixed.

The city sits in silences,
no one stirs,
no one understands the faces they see
everyone is hiding
so no one knows where to look.
So we try and look at the stars
the beautiful icons of light
spawned out over the dying Canada sky.
Oh how blinded we have come
for the lights of capitalism
block out those dead celestial creatures.

No one is afraid of the dark.
We're just scared that the starlight shows
that which the sun never did.

EvilToasterElf

blueintheface wrote:

NEED CRITICISM!!

Winnipeg sits trapped
in dirty snow
and dirty politics.

Salt spills from trucks
in the night, those
yellow lights flashing, dilating
our drunken pupils
and driving the broken streets
that the City Council still hasnt fixed.

The city sits in silences,
no one stirs,
no one understands the faces they see
everyone is hiding
so no one knows where to look.
So we try and look at the stars
the beautiful icons of light
spawned out over the dying Canada sky.
Oh how blinded we have come
for the lights of capitalism
block out those dead celestial creatures.

No one is afraid of the dark.
We're just scared that the starlight shows
that which the sun never did.

If you're trying to address something as broad as corruption and capitalism, don't even mention them by name, just give us the examples and the images that make them so stark as to necessitate a poem. "How blinded we have come by the lights of a Wal-Mart parking lot" or something like that.

Otherwise I'd say the poem needs to be simplified, because you are trying to take on too much in the short space of the poem, or it needs to be lengthened to really ellicit the background and environment that makes such a depressing tone to the poem.

I like the ending though and the second stanza, I think the first could be a lot stronger.

Ms. Haiku

Try the poem without the first section. It weakens the poem because of the "dirty politics" cliche. The rest is much stronger without it.

burtschips

I actually like your first stanza, but i read it like an action comic link... ie something that bruce willis might say in sin city.... your writing is very lucid and unadorned...

Oh how blinded we have come
for the lights of capitalism
block out those dead celestial creatures.

thats very trad shakespear to me... but modern all the same.

pm me and I will let you have the forwarding address for the peg. if im the winner.