I also hate plot clichés. E.g., on a sitcom the lowly staff member’s mom is coming to visit. They’ve been saying that they’re really the boss. They talk the boss into switching jobs for the week. Etc.
Any show that rolls out such stale tropes* is one I avoid.
Modern Family, despite it’s updated characters, did a lot of these. I’d see the exact ending coming early on. I tried a couple times to watch several episodes but the clichés just ruined it. Lesser shows like Everybody Loves Raymond were cliché-fests. (Which goes to show you that most people actually love clichés.)
Tropes aren’t necessarily clichés. It’s just that most “named” tropes and such are.
The words skip lightly across images dark and painful, painting bittersweet pictures in your mind. They are the difference between showing and telling, between evoking and thudding. (DrFidelius gives something close to the David Bowie version, which repeats “there’s”, incorporating but hiding “is,” but that’s an effect that works better in balladry than poetry.)
Is the problem with your lines that they are cliché? Possibly. An old saying I just made up runs, “You can’t get them to read your second line if they stop at your first.” Maybe the rest of your poem is brilliant and your critic is unfair or unaware. We can’t tell when a stanza is taken out of context. But perhaps there are more important issues to think about.