JPF Home Page Forums Lyric and MP3 Feedback MP3 Feedback Forum Yours

Wendy,

It's easily fixed, depending on what your intention is, as to POV.

Just a pronoun or two needs changing to render a consistent POV to one resembling Kliebold's mom.

As the chorus appears to change POV, it vaguely resembles a "Greek Chorus" singing back to the singer (and audience) and could work, as is, by simply having another female singer sing that part. Maybe consider making this a duet?

EDIT: But let's say the hospital bed person is a different person from the killer, and you are singing as you.

This makes the chorus work perfectly without change. When you sing "he's yours" we know the killer is out there somewhere else, probably dead, and moreover is no kin to the singer.

This raises the question, though, looking back at V1-4, as to who the person in the hospital bed is, to you. All we know from what is given that it is not the killer, even though the hospitalized one has a security guard in front of the door, and the nurses turn away. You are alluding to what you told us in your last post, but maybe there's not enough in V1-4 to gather in the motives for the nurses behavior and the guard standing watch?

It seems you were hoping that we'd "get" that the hospitalized one is different, simply by allusive means--but it's a slippery thing your doing, having mentioned the security guard, and giving no concrete details. You were trying to protect someone's privacy and yet get who they were across with no allusions to gender or why they're being hospitalized. A very, very hard thing to do!

I know! Maybe allude to some feminine detail, somewhere in V1-4! That might be enough? And maybe lose the security guard. If you want an allusion to a suicide attempt, maybe somehow mention her having her stomach pumped, instead of the breathing tube.

Then the only problems left are V5-6, and it's because you call the killer son out, in the second person,

"They're all saying
What you are"

and that you is very confusing, as you next talk about

"But all I can see
Is my baby and me
Reading books
About dinosaurs"

which we are seeing as being the same person as you're talking about in V4, with "what you are"

But by simply saying "what he is" solves two problems: you put distance between you and the killer, and 2) it forces you to find a more feminine book than one of dinosaurs, since your rhyme would now be gone, and you'd be forced to with ""EEZ" or "EE-iz".

So achieving what you intended is not the hardest thing to do. All the emotion is already there, just the mechanics of how the pronouns work, need to be updated. That and giving us a feminine detail somewhere in V1-4. One feminine detail and we're seeing a girl in the hospital bed, and when we get to "what he is" we'll then, in hindsight, know that you are in that hospital room thinking about this boy killer who's out there, while you suffer through someone younger and female (in the hospital bed) that you are close to, and you are trying to make sense out of life. We'd get all that with just a few tweaks.

Yours is the bravest write I've seen in quite a while. Don't give up on it!

Mike