coping

My face and body is an emotional disguise.
Insecurities, and the act of scrutinising imperfections,
Provides a veil to mask
The things that could kill me.
The things I won’t think.
The things that could happen.
The consumption of blankness.
The things beyond my imagination,
I assume, though, that I will never try.
To imitate the feeling.
So if I say I'm ugly,
Despair over lumps,
Think about exams,
And oh so important marks.
Then I will be ok.
Because they are my fears.
And they will never devour me from within.

Okay so the biggest thing with the poem, is that I don't feel any kind of emotions while reading it. It just doesn't have anything that catches my eye, or wows me, it's just sort of a narrator telling us how they're feeling. The repetition of "The things that ___" I though sounded more like it belonged in a story then in a poem. A little less just stating how the narrator is feeling, and try and show us instead.

Good luck!

~Hope

Hiya!

So, I'm going to say that I agree with Hope for the most part, but I just wanted to expand upon the points that she made, okay? Show and tell is a really important rule in both poetry and prose for a number of reasons. If you show, the elements of your story or poem are more vivid, allowing the reader to picture it and thus relate. This is especially true in stories of sympathize, like this poem.

So the narrator of this has a bad life? So? The kind of poetry that you have here is what I would call "whiny". You never really tell us exactly what the narrator dislikes about his life, and because it's so vague, we don't really care because there are a ton of people who have or think they have terrible lives.

If you want the message of your poem to be successful, in addition to showing/telling, you should consider detail. What exactly does the narrator not like about their life? If you how us that, we'll be able to realize what he's going through and pin that to a time in our life. If we relate, we'll be more sympathetic. So, yeah. Hope this helps! PM me if you have any questions.

-Elinor xo

I agree with Elinor and Bondgirl. You don't want to do two things in poetry: whine and repeat yourself. After you said "The things" four times, I sort of lost interest. This was emotionally devoid as well. This subject has room for tons of emotion. I suggest you use this poem as a skeleton for a bigger, better one. Put some "flesh" on it, and this could be good.