Say, Little Devil

Say, little Devil,
Tell me, do you suppose
That the Crown of Thorns
Was crafted from a single rose?

Hearts of gold and castles of red,
The monster's never been under your bed.
Say, little Devil, I'll walk you home tonight.
We can dance through the fire and bask in moonlight.

Say, little Devil,
Roads lead nowhere, all dead ends,
If you're trying to get to where we are
Abandon all hope, my friend.

Say, little Devil, why do I love you so?
Am I addicted to your cruelty?
Love's sweet intoxication,
And life's dim afterglow.

Say, little Devil, If I begged you on my knees,
Would you take me in your arms?
Cast me down, drag me under,
With your evil, nasty charms?

Blind executioners will never swing their ax,
Say, little Devil, will you ever face the facts?
The monsters in your closet and the demons in your head,
They have always been there, since the first tear was shed.

Hey you guys! In my return to YWS, I thought I might post a new poem of mine. If you're reading this, Ena, it's about you! (Well, the devil part anyhow.) Just kidding.

Quick Note:
THIS POEM DOES NOT HAVE A SET RHYMING PATTERN. It is free verse, so if you are planning on ranting about stanza structure and all that, please don't. Thanks so much for reading! Please LIKE!

Well the rhyming is a bit off... No, joke! Please don't hate me!

I love the way this peice flows, the fact some of it rhymes but dosen't have to kind of adds to this affect. Sorry if I sound stupid, but I don't quite understand what it's about. Because at the beginnig you say "Say, little Devil, Tell me, do you suppose That the Crown of Thorns Was crafted from a single rose?" then in the final stanza it says "Blind executioners will never swing their ax, Say, little Devil, will you ever face the facts? The monsters in your closet and the demons in your head, They have always been there, since the first tear was shed", the stanzas on there own seem to make a lot of sense but put together (to me) it's as if it's collection of stanzas. It feels like the 'Little Devil' is your friend or someone/something close to you and you're asking and telling it things. Overall though I really do like it, I think it's mainly down to a lack of knowelage on my part for not understanding it clearly.

Hello. Here as requested.

THIS POEM DOES NOT HAVE A SET RHYMING PATTERN. It is free verse, so if you are planning on ranting about stanza structure and all that, please don't.

Free verse =/= being able to toss out things like flow, consistency, and coherency. Also, free verse tends not to rhyme at all, and emulates spoken language. Usually, once you start rhyming a poem you enter the world of structured poems, which are stricter in terms of what you can or cannot do.

Also, if a reviewer feels like commenting on an aspect of the work they thought was weak, they will do so, regardless of what sort of note is placed in the work. Such notes can actually dissuade reviewers, because they don't feel like you will take their advice.

On that note, let's start with the stanza construction.

You are distinctly lacking a pattern in this. Your rhymes, as you have noted, are all over the place, as is your repetition. I will not treat this as a free-verse poem because it holds enough of a structure (rhyming in general, repetition, all stanzas being four lines) to be treated as a structured/rhyming poem.

Patterns and structured poetry tend to go hand in hand. Now, you can have any pattern you want (alternating rhyme schemes per stanza, having a sort of hourglass pattern where the first and last stanzas have the same pattern, then second/fourth, third being on its own) but there must be some sort of detectable pattern for flow to happen. It's much less jarring to read a poem and have to adjust what you're expecting in every stanza on every read. When a pattern is detected, it makes the poem easier to get into for me.

Now, your repetition. Where you repeat and not doesn't have a pattern, but I've rambled about that enough, and what you repeat also isn't consistent. It's like you chose your line breaks based on how many lines would end up in the poem instead of forcing the rhyme and stanza to conform to a set structure.

A special note about your formatting: Why is it centered and in small-caps? It doesn't seem to add anything extra to the work, and was just done on a whim. While small-caps are not the hardest form of writing to read, they do make the poem visually unappealing because you lack the individual shape of each letter to generate subconscious interest. It can also dissuade people right at the start, because it's not a normal format to read. The centering just added to this, and combined this poem had me almost as focused on the formatting as the content. This is not an impression you want to generate.

Onto your actual content.

Only stanzas two/three, then four/five have any sort of connecting story to them. Not even the same story that I can see, at that. While this is lyric poetry and not narrative, poetry should have some sort of consistency to it. While each stanza can look unrelated to the other, based on the images it uses, there's usually some connecting thread throughout the whole poem. This thread can be a theme, emotion, or moral (which is very tricky to handle and I don't recommend it).

While you may or may not have some sort of story in here, it gets more than a little lost because of how you have written the poem. There are images and phrases that are there just to fill the four lines and rhyme "scheme" that don't harmonize the whole poem together, making each stanza build on the previous to create something really memorable and rich.

By breaking your images and having each stanza read like its own story at first glance (the first two being particularly disconnected, with the sixth coming up with messages out of nowhere for me), you lose that richness. It takes full-on analysis to get the hidden story, and even then it's just a guess. Because the story only stays connected for a couple stanzas at a time, it gets even more difficult.

My suggestion is to forget about cute poetry conventions like rhyming and "must be four lines" stanzas and write the story out first. Then flesh it out with poetic devices, rhyme and structure. Then, you don't get lost in the pretty words and focus on the core of the poem first. While you can focus on just the words for some poems, this one has some sort of meaning behind it (could just see there was a meaning, not so much what it was because of the aforementioned disconnects) so you should figure out the meaning and story, work on making it coherent, and only then do you get to hang flesh and clothes on your poem skeleton.

PM me if you have any questions or comments.

~Rosey