Feedback Appreciated

[NekrotikKannibal]

I'm recently trying to get back into writing after having taken a five year hiatus. This is the first poem that I've written since I've gotten back into it. I would greatly appreciate any constructive criticism.

Catching Death

You caught your death
While I slept next to you
It came, quiet
As it often does
A quick kiss
A sudden exhalation
Then, nothing
Then came the flowers
The smell, suffocating
A heady aroma like a funeral parlor
Buried beneath heavy blooms
Crushed beneath the velvet rose petals
Suffocated beneath the lilies' delicate touch
A smell, faint, beneath the flowers
Something heavy and sweet
A sickly scent of something
A quick scent of death
There, hiding amongst the flowers
Your death, the same death that came for you
I can feel it watching me
There, behind the lilies
I smell its faint aroma,
there behind the chrysanthemums
It would seem that your death has found me
Hiding behind the flowers, it has found me
Lying amongst the flowers
Your flowers
There, I caught my death

[RobertM]

Feedback: Have to say somewhere in the poem what actually CAUSED the death. Invent something good. If people died simply from sleeping next to each other, the total population would be zero. Name a cause.

[saviolo]

I like your work, definitely. You should be writing more.

I never say much specifically about poems because they are so personal but there were a couple of things which struck me:

"You caught your death
While I slept next to you"

Seems to me that later in the poem you describe death as something more proactive. Its not that they caught their death but that death caught them?

"Then came the flowers
The smell, suffocating
A heady aroma like a funeral parlor
Buried beneath heavy blooms
Crushed beneath the velvet rose petals"

I think you could do more with this. Suffocating, heady, velvet petals - not quite cliche but a a bit lazy? Poetry gives you the opportunity to play with words a little more than prose. What struck me here was the idea of being buried alive by the 'stuff' with which we cover up death. And being crushed beneath something as light as petals could certainly be developed a bit more.

"It would seem that your death has found me"

This was the strongest part of the poem for me - the idea of death as a hunter, moving from person to person. Perhaps literally, perhaps just through grief, which can be a very crippling emotion.

Overall - I really liked it, and you should keep writing. I'd be very interested to see a second draft.

[AndrewCollar]

Coming from the perspective of being a song writer and guitarist for a black metal band, that poem is a bit dark and blunt; although, the end has me drawing for straws on the meaning of "There, I caught my death." Is it as if suicide was the vague meaning being those words or was it learning and understanding of what death is or means to you in that moment?