Love Isn't Always On Time

Against my shoulder
Her head rests
Weeping at the loss
Drained of her bests

I long to kiss her
Tell her it will all be okay
But she's not mine, nor his anymore
I look forward to the day

See her at school
Yet she doesn't make a sound
No longer looks forward but down
In heartbreak she is drowned

I want to tell her I love her
That I'd never hurt her so bad
But it's not the time nor place
Not when she's so sad

Days, weeks, 2 months passed
The little progress she made
Towards repairing her broken heart
Is not enough, we're all afraid

Every time she hold me close
And every time she looks at me
These lips of mine take all my strength
To keep from acting so invasively

And every night and passing day
More unstable I become
Sadness, euphoria, anxiousness
And more do I act dumb

Then one day a note appeared
On my locker addressed from her
Opening it as my gut wrenched
Looking for the word

Love was what I saw,
Not once not twice but 4 times
And as my heart leapt moving my eyes across the page
I saw a final sentence causing my demise

There for her I always was
Love for me she made so clear
In that final sentence
Which I should have held so dear

Putting aside my love so long
Inside the emotion hid
Worn out my flame for her did die
And of that note I did get rid

First of all, welcome to YWS!

Now, onto your poem. I really, really liked it! I can totally relate to this and I think you described everything really well. Personally, I think the ending was the best part because it kept this poem from being horribly cliche. Great job on avoiding unoriginality! I can never seem to manage that...

However, you did have a few mistakes. (Not big things, I swear!) First of all, there were a few instances where instead of writing out the number using letters, you just wrote the number (i.e. instead of writing two, you wrote 2). I'm of the opinion that actually writing out the number always looks better. Using the numeral just has a sort of text message-y feel that doesn't really fit in with poems, if you know what I mean.

Litehawk wrote:There for her I always was
Love for me she made so clear
In that final sentence
Which I should have held so dear

Putting aside my love so long
Inside the emotion hid
Worn out my flame for her did die
And of that note I did get rid

My problem with those stanzas is that the transition is a bit jarring. It just made me do a bit of a double take to "get my bearings" in the poem. I'm not sure if that's just my inexperience at reading poetry (I've only recently gotten into it) or a legitimate feeling, so feel free to disregard this. I just think that these two stanzas would work better if you added an additional stanza in between them. Again, feel free to disregard that as I am extremely inexperienced when it comes to poetry.

There was a bit of a problem with rythym/flow here:

Litehawk wrote:Sadness, euphoria, anxiousness

I think it would read a lot better if you changed it to: "Sadness, euphoria, anxiety".

Obviously, there are no huge mistakes that I noticed, and I really do love this poem! I find it very original and beautiful. I can't wait to read more of your stuff and if you have any questions, feel free to PM (private message) me.

~Becki

Before I begin: Welcome to YWS. Remember that it is only right that you crit two for every post you make. Blah blah blah set of rules, read them, live them.

Now, I read through the poem, and I'll be straight up: It needs work. Spot shots include:

Litehawk wrote:Against my shoulder
Her head rests
Weeping at the loss
Drained of her bests

From the get-go, your meter is off, and you're forcing your rhymes. Not cool. Also, "drained of her bests"? I'm not sure of what that means. If it was supposed to be a foil to "loss", it didn't quite work, as "best" isn't the opposite of "loss". This does bode well for the rest of the poem.

I long to kiss her
Tell her it will all be okay
But she's not mine, nor his anymore
I look forward to the day

See her at school
Yet she doesn't make a sound
No longer looks forward but down
In heartbreak she is drowned

More awkward meter, no punctuation, and there is absolutely no transition between these two stanzas. What day is the speaker looking forward to? Is he looking forward to the day when he sees her at school? Put that somewhere. Is he looking forward to a different day, and school is just a time/setting change? Make sure you tell the reader that, because as it stands, all it says is, "I look forward to the day see her at school." And now I have no idea what's going on.

I should note here that I'm not purposely trying to be mean, but it's all about nitpicky details that make a poem great. And with my intense ADD, if there is a little detail that is off, it ruins the piece as a whole. Moving on...

I want to tell her I love her
That I'd never hurt her so bad
But it's not the time nor place
Not when she's so sad

Awful, AWFUL forced rhyme here. And with no punctuation, it makes it even worse. I'll make the note about poetry punctuation at the end.

Days, weeks, 2 months passed

Write out "two" here. As a general rule, any number ten or under should be spelled out.

Every time she hold me close
And every time she looks at me
These lips of mine take all my strength
To keep from acting so invasively

Poor meter again. Forced rhyme again. And passive voice is just gross. Any publisher worth their salt will ask you to rewrite this to use less words and take up less space.

And every night and passing day
More unstable I become
Sadness, euphoria, anxiousness
And more do I act dumb

A great lesson in sentence organization: In line two, it makes sense to rearrange the phrase like that. In line four, it doesn't. Not only more do you act dumb, but more does it look and sound dumb.

Then one day a note appeared...

"Then" isn't necessary here.

Love was what I saw,
Not once not twice but 4 times
And as my heart leapt moving my eyes across the page
I saw a final sentence causing my demise

Spell out "four". Lines three and four are WAY too long. It's like you realized that your meter was sucky, and threw it out the window for these last two lines. Gross.

There for her I always was
Love for me she made so clear
In that final sentence
Which I should have held so dear

Putting aside my love so long
Inside the emotion hid
Worn out my flame for her did die
And of that note I did get rid

And you finish with a bang. And by "bang," I'm referring to the sound of a revolver being put up to the head of sentence syntax and the trigger being pulled, sending blood, skull, and brain matter flying to the opposite wall. Disgusting analogy, but it's true. Can you honestly look me in the eye and say that when you read that out loud, it sounds good? Because it doesn't. At all.


Overall, this needs a lot of work. There was no such thing as syntax, punctuation, meter, emotion, anything like that. All of the rhymes were forced, and it was just disgusting to read. A good rule of thumb is to read it out loud: if something sounds wrong, it probably is.

Also, the main goal of poetry is brevity. Novelists are novelists for a reason: they are verbose, and need a lot of descriptors. Poets are poets for an opposite reason: they can use metaphors and other literary techniques to get major points across in as few words as possible. (The exceptions to the rule, of course, are The Iliad and The Oddessy by Homer, and The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope, which are epic poems, and need to be long-ish.)

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to work on grammar, syntax, and brevity. If you improve these skills, not only will your work improve, but you'll get a much more positive review than what I've given you. Also, please don't stop writing. I threw a lot at you, and in some cases, I was pretty mean. But this should just give you incentive to be better, so one day you can post a poem on here and say, "Screw you, Flem, I'm an AWESOME writer!" Write something every day: a poem, a story, a novel (if you can do that), something to help you improve your work. Try out different forms of poetry: vilanelles, sonnets, haikus, limericks, something that is a different form than this.

Hope I didn't scare you off,
--kf


POETRY PUNCTUATION: Just because you're writing a poem, doesn't mean you have to sacrifice great writing for it. Your poem should still follow punctuation rules, as it is still a literary work. My Poetry professor put it this way: "a poem is a story, except shorter and with line breaks." That being said, let's take a look at your first stanza:

Against my shoulder
Her head rests
Weeping at the loss
Drained of her bests

As it stands, in prose form, it looks like this:

"Against my shoulder her head rests weeping at the loss drained of her bests"

Awful to read that way, right? So let's add punctuation, to make it better: commas, colons, periods, dashes, whatever it needs to make it look better. Adding them in, prose form is much easier to read:

"Against my shoulder her head rests, weeping at the loss, drained of her bests."

And when we put it back in poem form:

"Against my shoulder
Her head rests,
Weeping at the loss,
Drained of her bests."

It looks so much better now! It's much more legible, and it's much less of an eyesore. Keep this in mind as you continue your work in poetry.
--kf

Wow. I wonder what what the note said? Was it a suicide note? Was it a love note? You're killing me here! I liked the way you did the stanza...But I think it would flow much better with more, and the syllables didn;t match up, but who am I to critique a writing that has no rules?






~Cheez_Burger~

cheez_burger wrote:Wow. I wonder what what the note said? Was it a suicide note? Was it a love note? You're killing me here!

I think it was a love note

Aww. It's really nice! I especially like the ending, it's a good way to end it, and it keeps in the mood and theme of the piece.
The only thing I think you could change, is that some of the lines don't flow as well as others, because of the different syllables. But that's up to you.
I liked this, thanks for posting!

~Mo.

Okay.

First of all, well done. I liked this a lot. You have a nice story and you're going somewhere with it.

I think you're being too long-winded about it. The story is nice, but dragged out. And you're doing Yoda-speak, swapping words around to fit the rhyme. So get rid of the rhyme crutch! You don't need it. This is a good story and you're making yourself work too hard when you really don't need to.

Other than that, use words instead of figures. You're saying

2 weeks

where "two weeks" would be more appropriate and professional. It's just little grammatical points like that, which I won't go into detail about. If you read it over a few more times, you'll pick them up.

Well, that's all the nitpicking I can do for you. I hope I helped.
~Grin