Conflagration

[flotsson]

can you see them 
writhe 
over their kin 
a Rat King's born 
alone in the miry 
dark

Trying something different from my normal stuff, playing around with brevity.

I really like this. My only criticism would be, why not punctuate it? And as you have capitalised "Rat King", why not capitalise the rest?

I would have it like this:

Can you see them 
writhe 
over their kin? 
A Rat King's born 
alone in the miry 
dark.


It seems pretentious not to use punctuation in this particular instance—unless there is a justification for it that I'm missing.

Short poems like this are difficult to critique, because anyone can sound reasonably eloquent in 20 words. And this is like a Banksy: well done, but it's one colour and you see it all at once.

Limiting myself to only a few lines, I thought about punctuation and capitalization as a way to emphasize tone. I intended the lack of punctuation to encourage a certain speed of reading. The lines run into each other a bit only forcing you to slow on the single word lines, writhe and dark. Ending with a period might not kill the effect, but seems unnecessary. The lack of capitalization wasn't arbitrary, but maybe it's personal and doesn't come across. To my eyes, having "Rat King" as the only capitalized phrase adds to the unsettling tone; it looms large in the poem where everything else is almost whispered. Again, maybe that was a failing on my part. Either way, it's a failure of imagination on my part that I can't think of another way to convey that aspect of the tone.