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Kadreshi —
A Poor Man's Life
#ballad #broke #dfc #poverty #work #projectdfc #dfc2018
Published: 2018-12-29 00:15:45 +0000 UTC; Views: 2433; Favourites: 30; Downloads: 0
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Description
A poor young man takes off his shoes.He worked all day to earn his keep.
His arms are weak. His feet both hurt.
He’s tuckered out and needs his sleep.
Tonight he’ll try to stay awake.
His son is six and wants to play.
His mom’s at work and gets home late.
The neighbor’s there, but she can’t stay.
He gets about three hours of rest,
and takes the hits as life arranges.
He treasures life and what he has,
and so nothing ever changes.
He knows his life’s far from perfect;
that many things could be better.
He hopes that they will be, and he
believes nothing lasts forever.
Tomorrow he’ll be up at dawn,
to put his son onto the bus,
and with some luck he’ll get right up,
and eat his food without a fuss.
After that then he’s off to work,
to do his best to not be poor.
He does as he must to provide
so his son may, someday, have more.
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Comments: 46
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This was my dad's life most of my childhood. This hits hard. Well said. You truly deserves the DD!
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Thank you. I'm glad my poem was able to elicit such a connection, and have such an impact for you. 
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Yes and yes. I am very fortunate to have amazing supportive parents who practically always stood behind my life choices. I also have an amazing wife and a couple of kids of my own. Also, my parents were kind of naive and definitely not streetwise in any way, shape or form which meant i could get away with all kind of crap. It used to drive my sister nuts because she never figured out how to get away with it and would get busted all the time. Why am I telling you all this? LOL
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I'm not sure, perhaps because you got caught up in the stories in your own mind while replying to the comment, and your thoughts simply carried over into your reply. I've done that before. I don't mind. If anything I find it interesting.
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Yeah, "nostalgia" does kind of sound like a bad medical condition, doesn't it? I hope I didn't infect you. XD
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Good one! LOL I guess I could have used that shot myself.
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Maybe, especially since it's not a suppository. LoL
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O_o Okay I am not touching that comment.
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Thank you, and I'm glad you enjoyed it.
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I have noticed that literature doesn't get nearly as much traffic (views, favorites, etc) as images do, which isn't surprising, but even a Literature piece with a DD can have less traffic than a decent image without one. Anybody can write or draw. It's the quality that counts, that's what sets an artist apart from the masses.
Now who's flattering who? I try to read and write whenever I have time, and I'll comment, favorite, or watch as I see fit. I don't favorite everything I read or even comment on everything I favorite, but if I feel the need to say something or ask a question I don't hesitate. I do always make efforts to respond to every comment though.
As for how well I write. I'm quite flattered that you think I write well, especially since my formal literature education is quite limited (basically high school and like two months of English 101). Everything else I know has been learned either on my own (which is how I learned the majority of what I know about writing/literature) or from a very few select people (some even on Deviant Art) who have helped me improve certain aspects of my writing along the way. You even helped me learn some things about writing prose when you were helping me improve "The Hermit: A Tarot Tale". Clearly I have a desire to learn and improve. Maybe some day I'll be good enough to make money writing. Being poor kind of sucks. LoL
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Haha- yeah, in many ways, being poor is no fun. It's hard to make much money writing, though, I think. I always felt fortunate to make whatever money I did as a writer. Do you read a lot? I think avid readers make interesting writers. At least there aren't so many typos or errors. As far as exposure on dA goes, it always changes. But I think a major change was when the site stopped putting DDs in a footer on every page. I wonder sometimes how new people find them. And I see the low numbers around them, and wonder. Maybe you can read some comments on the poll I put up a while back (it's on my profile page) and learn how writers feel about feedback, changes, DDs, community, etc.
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I read as often as I can. I love reading as well as writing. I know there is a thing in settings that under "Browsing" in "General Browsing" there is a thing that allows you to "Enable Stick Menu" which is basically like an adjustable second header under the main header. It shows up on every page, but does not work with "Eclipse", but the point of mentioning it is that "Daily Deviations" can be added as one of the links on it. Outside of that the only other way I know of is just going to the DA homepage, then on the left side "Daily Deviations" is the forth one down under sort. So yeah, I can see how it could be a bit difficult for someone new to find them. My guess is that they probably end up on the homepage and find them that way.
I'll have to check that out. It sounds interesting.
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If you just go to the upper left right away and click on "deviantart" there, you go immediately to the page to pick 'daily deviations' - but I don't know how I learned that. :
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Very nicely done!!
Congratulations on your much deserved DD!
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Thank you, and I'm glad you enjoyed it.
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Thank you. I'm quite proud of it.
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Thanks, I tried figuring out ways to alter this to make it into perfect iambic tetrameter without diminishing the quality or integrity of the piece, but the way it's written just hits a little too nicely for me to want to change it. Especially, if the only reason I'd be changing it would be to fit the form. I'd just rather sacrifice the meter.
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I think words and sounds are more important than any strict adherence to form.
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This is exactly the kind of thing I love most. The simple act of reading it was enjoyable and the focus of the story was relatable. Left me feeling like I just absorbed wisdom.
I do have to point out though, since I see what you were going for in your comments, that it's only truly iambic in the first, second, and fifth stanzas. The form skips about a bit through the rest of it. It doesn't break up the flow too badly though and it's pretty awesome regardless.
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First, thank you for the compliment, and I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Second, thank you for pointing that out. Meter, honestly, is among my weakest points when it comes to poetry. I've been struggling to learn and improve, but I haven't had many people tell me when and where I messed up, so it's been difficult to determine exactly what is considered correct. Now that you pointed out which ones fit the form it allowed me to focus on the ones that didn't, and I could tell some areas of fault. Does this work as well as, or better than, the original, and more so does it fit the meter specifications?
"A poor young man takes off his shoes.
He worked all day to earn his keep.
His arms are weak. His feet both hurt.
He’s tuckered out and needs his sleep.
Tonight he’ll try to stay awake.
His son is six and wants to play.
His mom’s at work and gets home late.
The neighbor’s there, but she can’t stay.
He tries his best to get some rest,
and takes the hits as life arranges.
He loves his life and what he has,
and so nothing ever changes.
He knows his life is not perfect;
Clearly, some things could be better.
He hopes that they will be, and he
believes nothing lasts forever.
Tomorrow he’ll be up at dawn,
to put his son onto the bus,
and with some luck he’ll get right up,
and eat his food without a fuss.
When that is done, he’s off to work,
to do his best to not be poor.
He works so hard, and does provide
his son some sort of chance at more."
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So I tried to post a comment on this but for some reason dA was like THIS IS SPAM. So I copied it to stash.
Untitled(Sorry if this comment is ridiculously long.) Let me go over the original with you first and I'll point out a few things. I'll put the stresses in bold.
A poor young man takes off his shoes.
He worked all day to earn his keep. <--Really nice iambic tetrameter. Getting the first stanza perfect is great at reinforcing the
His arms are weak. His feet both hurt. meter for your reader and conditioning them into rhythm. That way later if you want
He’s tuckered out and needs his sleep. to change it up slightly, they don't get completely derailed. They know what to fall back
to.
Tonight he’ll try to stay awake.
His son is six and wants to play.
His mom’s at work and gets home late.
The neighbor
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This made for a nice birthday gift. Thank you, I don't know if it was actually intended as one, but I was still happy to get it. This is the kind of thing I've been wanting somebody to do. I think it will help immensely, especially in future poems. I'll likely make some edits to this, not sure if I'll set it to iambic throughout though. We'll see, but regardless this was very appreciated.
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No problem. I was in much the same boat myself once where I was writing a lot but didn’t really have anybody to tell me about what I was doing and it can be very frustrating not knowing if you’re improving or not. Didn’t know it was your birthday but Happy Birthday! all the same.
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That is exactly how I was feeling. It's nice to meet someone who has been through the same struggle, and has a willingness to help. So, again, thank you.
Also, I copy and pasted your big comment to my stash, in case you didn't want to keep it in yours, obviously that's up to you. However, I wanted to make sure that I'd have it for future reference, and that seemed like a good place to keep it. I put by and your username as the title to remind me who wrote it, and not to delete it.
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Any time! And I'll leave it in there for a good while just in case. Glad I could help.
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The longer it's there is the longer I have a fail-safe in case I accidentally delete it out of my stash. LoL
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What an endearing piece! This is a Critmas Critque btw (Merry Critmas!), so if you don't know what that is, come and check it out:
First of all I want to start off with my favourite bits:
"After that then he’s off to work,
to do his best to not be poor."
... This one I felt summed it up so nicely: doing your best, trying to hang on and keep from sinking. I was going to paste the whole stanza, but there's something about the rhythm in 'he does what he can to provide' that doesn't flow as smoothly as the other parts (you can test this kind of thing by reading it out loud to 'try it on for size', so to speak), which is a bit of a shame.
I also really liked
"He gets about three hours of rest,
and takes the hits as life arranges.
He treasures life and what he has,
and so nothing ever changes."
Ain't this the truth? I feel it's often like that with people who have trouble making ends meet: they can't exert control over their own lives as much, and know better than to risk what they have chasing dreams. It's a sad truth, alas.
So I can summarise you've displayed genuine wisdom in this poem, and I wish more people would see and read it.
Thank you for sharing, and have a Happy New Year on behalf of this year's Critmas Team Tannenbaum Trebuchet!
Cheeeeeers
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Thank you for this critique, and I'm glad you enjoyed the poem. I'm always glad to get the input of my readers, especially if they're writers as well. Also, like you, I hope that more people will get to enjoy this too.
As for the line 'he does what he can to provide', I can hear it too, and thanks for pointing it out. I think the C in 'can' was throwing it off the most. I think changing 'can' to 'must' helped with that. It definitely sounds better to me that way. Also, I think changing 'what' to 'as' may help as well. Do these changes help enough in your opinion?
"After that then he’s off to work,
to do his best to not be poor.
He does as he must to provide
so his son may, someday, have more."
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I like that inner rhyme there: 'must' and 'does' have the same vowel sound, and both are emphasis so that's excellent.
... I'm sure there's a technical term for that, but I can never remember these things right!
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Awesome, I'm glad I could figure out something that worked to fixed that without changing large portions of the poem. Thanks again for pointing that out.
Also, I believe the term is assonance.
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YES! Yes that's the one! Slippery word, that one - keeps evading me!
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Yeah, I know how that goes. LoL I find it funny when I come up with several synonyms for the word I want, but I still can't think of the right word.
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I'm glad you enjoyed it.
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