Simulacra and the Boy

Hi! Ignorant writer and reader here to give some thoughts on this.

So I read this as an internal monologue. Simply: the speaker, bored and jaded, reflects on the state of the modern world (or the postmodern world) and becomes sad. I can understand the mixed emotions of the speaker—cynicism and awe, sorrow and nostalgia—but some of the choices in the above work confuse and muddle the tone.

For clarification, tone is the way the author (or speaker, depending on your definition) feels about what they are writing/saying/creating.

In the above piece, there are many choices the author can make to clarify the tone. Please understand that I am calling this a piece, not a poem, because it doesn't really read like a poem. Poems have line breaks and stanzas, not sentences and paragraphs. If you don't want to use line breaks, then the piece is not a poem. This isn't just my pickiness either: poems are characterized by some combination of meter, rhythm, rhyme, or other sorts of flow. Line breaks are our best tool in creating that flow in the mind of the reader.

The piece above reads jagged and sharp. This engenders not the frenzied fervor of a madman jotting down their thoughts of the world, but the melancholy of depressed teenager detailing their angst. Less exciting, more generic. Let's play with a bit of the piece and see how the tone changes when we add line breaks:

original

"I can not find meaning in this world, I too have become inert to reality, high on an overdose of" (1).

with a few changes:

​

I cannot find meaning

in this world I too am

inert

even more obviously:

"I am nihilism, I am not" (2) becomes:

I am

nihilism

I am

not

Do you see how playing with the line breaks changes the tone of the piece? I'm not arguing that the above works for the author, or even reads very clearly at all, but it certainly makes choices. As a reader, I want to see the choices that the author makes. By eschewing line breaks, the author gives the impression that they don't care—not only about the world, but about the poem.

I would critique the subject matter as well, but to be honest I don't particularly find it very interesting. The self-referentiality of "I am nihilism, I am not" (2) is somewhat obtuse, and using the word "postmodern" (1) within the piece to describe a main thesis of the piece is...an interesting choice to say the least.

"Even if god does not exist, surely his embrace is rendered inaccessible by the maze of divine images" (1)

This doesn't make any sense. It would make more sense as:

"Even if god exists, surely his embrace is rendered inaccessible by the maze of divine images" (1)

I don't particularly like the word choice throughout the piece, either. It's not very euphonious, and euphony matters.

I appreciate the work that went into this piece, but it needs a lot of revision.