What an intense piece! Short and sharp, concise and yet deep. You have clearly shown the effects of drug abuse by depicting a heroinomaniac, and I liked that! Perhaps, you made a brief stanza to show the temporal effects of excitation, but I still would recommend a slightly more developed poem. Perhaps, a life story of the drug addict showing the progression towards physical and mental degeneration. That would be certainly interesting.
Powerful piece. You've done a great job of capturing the ambiance of the addict, particularly with "eyes hollow and dusk"
I don't have much personal experience with heroin or heroin addicts, as meth seems to be the drug of choice du jour. In my younger years, everyone I knew seemed to have a coke problem.
Drug addictions are so difficult to watch. In addition to whatever physical effects the particular drug may have, there's always the core problem, which is that escaping the world is better than living in it. If only people could spend as much time and money fixing their world as they do escaping from it!
well in the first stanza i'd change the second and third semi-colons with commas. but apart from that i think it's extremely good. nice comparison with a tree - he/she is stuck, trapped by the roots of the addiction. the last three lines capture how faded they are now, the burning of the addiction has stripped them of everything else. infact there's so much i could say about every line in that stanza.
the second stanza isn't quite as good. i'd get rid of the first semi-colon and again replace it with a comma. also the word pulsating doesn't really work as to me it implies life and energy and even healthy, so maybe i'd go for something else. i love the phrase "gawp-eyed" and its sound. once again you've got the whole trapped thing going on. though i'm not too sure about fishmonger, it doesn't seem quite right, unless the fishmonger is the dealer, i don't know.
Wonderful images in both stanzas and especially that first one, albeit, I'm not sure if you need 'the' before 'faded ochre' and I'm not sure if you need the 'fishmonger' either. lol nessie
i like the comparisons you used like the fish giving up having used up the last of it's strength for struggle and the use of dryad means it is about a girl, or at least to me it does
you don't have to be a drug addict to be like that. one can become so jaded to life it's like they're petrified like a living statue. solid stone
To compare an addict with a calcified wood nymph is quite the stroke of a skilled wordsmith (and the implication of an inverted sculpture/wood carving is inventive; flesh become inanimate substance rather than substance made to appear flesh). The lifeless fish metaphor is not quite as striking (perhaps because it seems to exist only as counterpoint to the first stanza), and the two halves appear to function at different levels of thought. Transformation into a lower life form/twisted wildlife is evidently what happens to everyone who surrenders free will to base elements such as Heroin. Sad, sad, sad. Hope that motivates you to continue to use yuor skill for social awareness as well as art. Take care of yourself. Bill.
looks like this poem took its sweet time to open up. at least it reared its head into the form we see now. i wonder about the dry ice in the end, it makes more sense in an eerie way than the rest of this piece. a portrait of a heroin addict... the descriptions of an addict here are wonderfully colorful... but then again, there is a mystique on who the heroin addict really is, the subject or the author (lol, not a reflection on you though) and images of iggy pop come to mind... (must me the attached photo doing that... yeah and a wonderfully appropriate photo it is).
as for bashing, i dont like to bash... and i dont see anything wrong with this piece for bashing to begin with. solid, and strong. great flow too, comes out naturally... doesnt look like its three years in the making.
Submission Name: Portrait of a Heroin Addict
