I'm afraid I'm more in Brad's camp than Lottie's, but I'll see if I can't give you a few more productive hints towards rewriting this.
(1) Please, please, please, in the name of the poetry gods, do not ever start a poem with some variant of "I am sorry, so-and-so." It gives the poem an incredibly annoying amateur feel, and a lot of readers might even hit the back button at that point.
I know that this apology is central to your piece; what you might consider doing if you rewrite this is showing how remorseful the narrator is, rather than telling. For instance, instead of saying "I love you" in a poem, you might describe the person or something that happened with that person, and by utilizing the connotations of the words used, meter, rhythm, pacing, and tone, you would convey your love for that person. And that's the key; have a little faith in your audience. We can pick up on that sort of thing.
(2) I swore I'd never do this after I was done with "Lost in the Funhouse," but I'm actually going to quote John Barth. In that short story, he states, "The more cosely an author identifies with the narrator, literally or metaphorically, the less advisable it is, as a rule, to use the first-person narrative" (The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction, 88 ).
If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. It's harder to make the narrative voice irritatingly self-loathing or angsty if you, the author, are writing from the outside in. It can also lend a great deal of power; describing someone else doing something cliched never sounds nearly as bad as describing yourself, using the word "I," doing something cliched. It may still be bad, but it's getting better. Try taking this out of the first-person; create a protagonist in your head--even a doppelganger, if you wish--and put him in the situation. Observe. Now write.
(3) The theme of not being able to cry at funerals, at least as you've done it, is somewhat of a cliche. Maybe if you attempt to approach this theme from a fresh angle, with more original imagery, it could help.
(4) "Bright dark day..." Ouch. Um. Just no. Oxymorons are great, but try to keep them to things that haven't been done a thousand times by bad middle-school poets.
I'm sorry to be so harsh, but I think you were right to "bin" this... I understand the subject matter is close to your heart, so I would definitely encourage a rewrite. But I don't mean rewrite as in, open this document, change a few words here, delete a stanza there, adjust line breaks... I mean, delete the old document, open a fresh, empty one (or a blank page, if you don't work on the computer) and start completely anew. Tabula rasa.
And I'll agree with Brad on this much, as well; best of luck with the rewrite!
Fand
"A good plot is like a dream.If you dont write down your dream on paper the moment you wake up,the chances are you'll forget it and it'll be gone forever"-Roald Dalh.
