I hope that the sequel will reveal what was eaten and if it was good.
It was pizza, sorry to disappoint.
I should have chosen something with an easy rhyme…
Fuck, poetry is hard. I keep returning to it with an edit or two, and this is just 9 lines. Made minor changes to hit the cadence better
I feel it is better balanced now, but HOW DO REAL POETS write this stuff? Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote thousands of lines. John Donne wrote dozens of sonnets. Shakespeare too. I mean even the (very) free verse of Don Marquis’ “Archy and Mehitabel” has hundreds of lines.
I have obsessed over this very mediocre poem for over 5 days.
Usually they do it with the same amount of self-flagellation you’re experiencing. My current poem is all of six lines long. I’ve been working on it for most of this year, and have repeatedly thrown out most of what I’d written as not saying what I wanted to say. On the other hand I’ve had poems that I’ve suddenly barfed up onto the page all in one go and barely amended thereafter.
Sometimes inspiration strikes. The other 99% of the time, it’s perspiration that reigns. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
ETA: You know what I end up obsessing about most? Fucking punctuation. “Why do you keep adding and removing commas?” I ask myself. I do not know the answer, but I keep doing it.
I like it. Well done. It does a great job of conveying the emotional content. I hope you find it helpful. As some of you might know, I recently switched professions from scientist to singer. And I’ve been finding that writing songs is a way to work on how I feel about things, such as my father and his death a few years back.
Hey, we all have to start somewhere!
From a reader’s point of view, what I would like to see – and this isn’t about form or meter – is something unexpected. An interesting image. An unusually phrased thought. A non-obvious rhyme or half-rhyme. Something that lingers. Take inventory of your sense as you gather your thoughts and words. Brainstorm images, memories, analogies, metaphors. Write anything that comes to mind and then cross out 95% of what you wrote to find something memorable or poignant to you and your reader.
For me, the main issue is the poem is fairly generic – and I do not mean this to be discouraging. Like I said, we all start somewhere, but I would encourage you to further follow your thoughts and senses and see if you could come up with more colorful descriptions/ideas. This does not mean verbosity is necessary. Be compact, but give me some color. One of my favorite poems begins: “Between my finger and my thumb/
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.” (Seamus Heaney, “Digging.”) It is a very clean image; a very compact image, and yet so much meaning and tension. Unexpected (half)-rhyme of thumb/gun. Sense of anticipation as the pen is resting. “Gun” image tied with the pen as something powerful, perhaps even menacing. The feeling of “snugness” as applied to both a “gun” and “pen,” something you might not normally connect. And so on.
Sorry, this is quick as I’m running out to work, so it may be meandering a bit, but I would start there before worrying too much about form