Vanity

It can elevate a person or send them crashing to their knees. It's a best friend and a worst enemy. It's all a person could ever want and everything they learn to hate.

I'm caught in my own mess of lies,

And everyday something about me dies.

Laying myself bare,I spread my arms wider,

I'm tangled in the web of a spider.

 

Life is just one big vanity fair,

Skin and eyes and lips and hair.

Obsessed with so many perfumes and potions,

Trying to be perfect with sweet scents and lotions.

 

I can never tell who I can trust,

When I should love and when I should lust.

All these worthless hugs from a meaningless friend,

A broken bond that perfection can't mend.

 

That meaningless friend told me dying is passion,

The news told me of starving for fashion.

I don't know quite who to believe,

It's not clear when to die or to breathe.

 

So all I do is simply smile,

Eat my heart and then run a mile.

Sit still and quiet whilst my teenage dream dies,

Because I'm living a life of vanity and lies.

Reviews

[BenKeane]

I really enjoyed this, the writing is strong and flows nicely and your frustration comes across really strongly, I think we can all relate in some way to this!

[Robert Gluzman]

Hello. This is my first review so It might not be that helpful :p

"I'm caught in my own mess of lies,
And everyday something about me dies."

-The rhymes fit in perfect, however a bit cheesy if you know what I mean? Lies and dies? Feels like I heard it many times before. Never the less I think its a strong and solid introduction that grabs the readers attention.

"Laying myself bare,I spread my arms wider,
I'm tangled in the web of a spider."

- I feel that the first line has a good intention of making us imagine something uncomfortable, but I think the metaphor that you use in the second line doesn't make a good combination. I understand that you want to express a feeling of being trapped, however the 'web' and 'spider' kind of makes me feel going a bit out of context in this case.

"Life is just one big vanity fair,
Skin and eyes and lips and hair.
Obsessed with so many perfumes and potions,
Trying to be perfect with sweet scents and lotions."

-This is sick, I love the subjunctive meaning behind this. A naive princess? Props to the alliteration here, it sounds really nice.

"I can never tell who I can trust,
When I should love and when I should lust.
All these worthless hugs from a meaningless friend,
A broken bond that perfection can't mend."

-In my opinion this goes a bit off track. There is a big leap from being naive or vain to not trusting anyone. Perhaps then the verse before this should be an introduction? Or add another verse that leads to this one. If you can fix this, I am sure it will sound a lot better.

"That meaningless friend told me dying is passion,
The news told me of starving for fashion.
I don't know quite who to believe,
It's not clear when to die or to breathe."

-I feel the rhyming here is really forced. The second line has a good meaning, but I feel that the combination of a fairy tale and media doesn't work so much here, unless the poem would have been longer and you could have built a second semantic field representing the news and adverts.

- The last line of the verse made me cringe, it just feels too forced. Perhaps you can explain that you 'breath' in too many different things? Scents of different potions? You cant tell anymore the difference between what is venomous and what is good.

"So all I do is simply smile,
Eat my heart and then run a mile.
Sit still and quiet whilst my teenage dream dies,
Because I'm living a life of vanity and lies."

-The conclusion itself is good but I feel you need to build up to it more. Describe to the audience more of how exhausted you are that all you do is smile.

-'run a mile'. In my opinion you can add a better rhyme. 'Build up of decay and bile'? Something like that... Try to keep your combination of words belong to the same group.

- The last two lines however are really nice. I love the repetition of how it started and ended.