Hello everybody! I'm very new to this subreddit, and looking to rediscover my passion for writing! I'd like to start by sharing a poem I wrote a few years ago to get some feedback and start the gears turning again! Sorry for the formatting, as I'm usually much more of a lurker!

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Worship

Sometimes I come back here – a compulsory return

Magnetized by memory to lessons never learned

A negative polarity that tempts a bitter fate – so easy to resist if I’d allow myself to hate

Mementos now immortalized in germinating thought

Sprouting ever faster in this place that love forgot

Fractured frames, once full of life, yet nothing left behind -- just symphonies that echo through the hallways of my mind

The ominous overture to a heavy-hearted prose

Trying desperately to dance but always stepping on your toes

Your broken picture gathers dust, and I, the foolish vandal, took the shattered glass for stained as I illuminated candles

I knelt before the altar, and I drank my fill of lies

Caught within the crosshairs in the barrels of your eyes

A communion wrought from poison, yet I raised it to my lips – clinging to salvation even as the passion slipped

I was bowing to an idol who’d abandoned my endeavors

And piously I worshipped all the bonds you sought to sever

Your sermon was delivered like a storm of twisting lead

A visceral eclipse to bathe our history in red

But the bullet wounds are beautiful, and painless in a way

Like a warm array of crimson standing out against the grey

My fingers stained with graphite, I revise the script once more, still I’m stricken with the feeling that I’ve written this before

A tired cast of misfits never living for the day

The cynical protagonist who never gets his way

Like men of ice who chase the sun will only find disaster

We’re nomads drifting through this life in search of greener pastures

There’s no passion in the mind, yet there’s no caution in the heart – a duality dividing fate and tearing lives apart

Clinging to the past so tight -- we’re strangling the hours

In death we will discern we never stopped to smell the flowers

They’ll wither on our headstones as we rest among the stars

So cherish every moment, because this is all we are.

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-Matthew

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Feedback:

https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/comments/w6gayj/did_i_take_my_meds_today/ihrktci/?context=3

https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/comments/w8gq9h/a_poem_about_anxiety/ihr0blp/?context=3