Similie-"A City In Ruins"

This seems like a dark poem, and it is. It was written to bring light to a dark subject. Because there ARE people out there that are in this amount of pain. But the final message brings inspiration

Her body...is like a city in ruins.

Her organs flicker on and off like dying lights.

Her lungs are twin towers that have fallen.

Her ribs are columns that USED to support beauty but are slowly crumbling.

Her throat is a damaged boom-box that sits on the stoop of a house that no one visits.

It whispers old school jams that remind her of what once was.

Her mind is a subway with graffitied trains running empty souls of past boyfriends through her memories.

Dirt sifts in between her brain cells but, there's no significant life here.

Like cracks in a sidewalk.

Arteries are unleveled sidewalks that are coated with the blood of teens and raped children, on every conrner of her veins you can find HIV cells slinging crack rocks to fallen immune systems.

Arthritis bends and repress' her fingers like broken highways that point to unobtainable pipe dreams.

Dirty pipes convex through like bones that SCREEEAM with every movement, and her knees are empty stadiums with lights that dim shadows of those movements.

They pray to unforgiving temples of five dollar blow jobs and crack pipe window pains decorate her church.

The roads to her lungs are jagged.

They bleed black like asphalt.

Leprosy tracks yellow lines down these roads.

They all lead to a single stop sign that reads "Cancer".

There's a motherless child walking backwards from the stop sign into negative grown images of VHS flashback's.

Unsuccessful kids litter her streets like paper and loot her dreams.

Unfertilized eggs fall like apples from dead tree limb ovaries.

She still lives in the night life of herself.

Her nose still skies down the snowy white mountains that peek her sinuses.

Smoke bellows like warped atmospheres on the surface of her lungs.

Alcohol flows rivers down her back alley spine.

And rapists wait on the edge of her vertebrate.

Little dollies pack the ground so that the trip to her cerebellum does not seem as rough.

There's a house, that sits just on the outskirts of her fingertips.

She uses acrylic nails to try to bridge to others across the ditches she's dug.

Her teeth are bent inwards and some are missing, so no matter what you can still see the back of her throat where lies dance with her tonsils.

Her throat is dented with pot holes and sewers.

There's a dilapidated city hall in her heart.

Every few years the janitor opens the doors for the dust to cascade out.

Bays rest in her eyes.

There are countless sloppy speed bumps that mark her wrists.

And there are twins committing suicide to their reflections in the glassless mirrors of the dance hall in her feet.

Broken glass coats her toe nails.

The concrete that foundations her is crumbling.

The sidewalks are bleeding.

Three of the columns in her ribs have fallen.

The subway system of her dreams is slowing down more and more each year.

The lights in the stadiums of her knees are starting to flicker.

The highways are decomposing into concrete trees.

There are no more hinges left on the doors of her teeth.

And city hall is starting to wither, imploding on her heart.

No one lives here except unborn children and the lost souls that take up residence just behind her kidneys.

It's no wonder she hears whispers in the bathroom.

She is 38 years old and her body is like a city in ruins, but everyday she wakes up with a smile on her face.

So to all the broken, drug addict, slit wrist women...it's never too late to start rebuilding.

Reviews

[Annette Jay Sweeney]

...wow. I'm rarely at a loss for words. I have read this twice and am still unsure what to say.

This poem has such great balance. It seems so long, almost over-detailed, but it works very well. You start out soft, then take off somewhere the reader may not have seen, and pull it back at the end. I do feel you don't necessarily need to say to whom you are speaking in the last sentence, but if you want to leave it that's fine. It's a message you get throughout the poem. Normally, poems with lines that go all the way across would bother me, but I think this works SO well in this poem. The form itself seems broken, scattered. It just adds to the experience. It's interesting you kept it as one stanza. I think it's good this way, so the reader doesn't get an escape from the onslaught.

Your imagery is breath-taking. Even say, five images in this poem are immensely striking enough to deserve commending, but you go on and on. This is fantastic! Each image is fresh. You may use a few cliches in some places, but you add such a personal twist that you make it your own.

If any part of the poem needs a little more work it's the end. I think maybe you just ran out of steam a little or something. It needs a little more of the spice you had in the rest of the poem.

The message behind this is great. I wasn't expecting it at all, but it made the experience all the more enjoyable. One of the beauties of this poem is that it seems easy to relate to for almost anyone, whether or not they have been through everything this woman has. I feel like I really know this woman, or have gone through some of what she has. It's powerful.

My favorite lines, although many are great:
"Her mind is a subway with graffitied trains running empty souls of past boyfriends through her memories."
"on every conrner of her veins you can find HIV cells slinging crack rocks to fallen immune systems."
"Unsuccessful kids litter her streets like paper and loot her dreams."
"Her teeth are bent inwards and some are missing, so no matter what you can still see the back of her throat where lies dance with her tonsils."
"It's no wonder she hears whispers in the bathroom."

I must say I'm always on the search for a truly talented writer on here, and I think I have found this in you. Please, keep writing. I'm really astounded.

[TTBoy28]

Wow, talk about "A Requiem for a Dream." You have alot of imagery in this write that, as far as I remember witnessing, is spot on. "It's no wonder she hears whispers in the bathroom..." I like this!

[Devons]

This is a tremendous elaboration of a splendidly clinical metaphor. From the moment I began reading, I had an immediate profile in my head of the proverbial destitute and vicious-circled life of many a heroin addict; an entity which one sees almost every day in the city; like dogged survivors in a concentration camp, animated purely by the perverse 'high' of deprivation to which they have sunk. Comparing the decaying vicissitudes of a concrete city with the brittle carcass of a lowly inveterate drug addict creates profound imagery and delivers a brutal, almost cruel message within the portrait that is sickeningly evoked; almost like an urban 21st century Picture of Dorian Gray..

There are a couple of tiny errors, and I think on occasions this poem repeats itself somewhat and could be improved with a little condensing of the descriptions, but that does not detract from the immense power it wields, and the intense portrait of desolated humanity which it paints so vividly. A great piece of work.