I Shall Never Write For You

Go for it. Burn me alive. Then tell me what I can do better.

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I will never write for you again,
for your heart is cold and stone.
You take my precious loving gift,
and use it like a laundry rag.

But what I forever truly feel,
will be locked away for good.
For I have loved and now have lost,
and fear to pain again.

Forever deeply I shall feel,
that I have loved you so.
But you shall never feel the same,
and only hatred show.

I like what you have here. I think maybe you should go deeper into the story. Maybe add what was written. For example will the character not write any more letters? Did the character write stories for his/her companion, or whomever the character is talking to? I also found that in the second line, I believe it should be 'your' not 'you are'. And in the last line of the first stanza, I think you should use something else besides 'laundry rag'. The reader is drawn into the poem, but 'laundry rag' sort of throws the poems' story off. Suppose you use the opposite of 'precious loving gift'. So maybe 'uncaring hating greed'? I don't want to use the wrong words to describe how the person mistreats the characters' gift to write, so I'll let you evaluate if you don't like my suggestion. But overall this is a really, really good poem.

Hiya kingolions,
So I feel like this whole poem challenged me to find something wrong with it. The whole time you were talking about someone being critical of your writing and here I am, also being critical.

Sorry for that momentary insane babbling.

Anyways, I found a grammatical error:

you are heart is cold and stone

"You are" should be "your".

Otherwise, I liked it. It was short, sweet, and to the point. It managed to convey both anger and a subtle hurt-feeling. I especially like that you used "shall." I cannot explain it, but I enjoy when people use words that aren't so ordinary and over-used. (like will and say and go, etc.)

again, sorry for the mad rambling. It is late where I live and i am tired.

so toodles!
~emerley

Wow! kingolions, this poem is awesome. *likes*

I couldn't find much wrong with this poem either, besides the grammatical error pointed out earlier. Good job, I really liked this poem..

and fear to pain again.

This one line, though, I had a little bit of trouble with. In my opinion maybe "and fear to feel pain again" might sound better. Maybe not, either way it's still an excellent poem. Good job!

Oh, won't you? ^^ But you are; right here you are, and that's the wonderful irony of it. To get the point across, it's what you have to do. You're forced to write about not writing. Funny.

It's interesting that you have used a pretty consistent rhythm here. I can feel the beats pulsating through the poem, even while not hearing the rhyme at the end of the lines - save for the last stanza. The 'death of writing' theme is sort of (again, cleverly and ironically) been given some life just by that simple care given to the music of the piece. However, on that same note, I find sticking to a strict rhythm can become limiting, in that one's ideas are sort of limited by the amount of space one must fill up, or is constrained to. In that regard, I'd say that the rhythm annoyed me.

Overall, I think the irony could have been perhaps more subtly played, and that a motif throughout would have gotten the point across far better than the half-hearted imagery:

I will never write for you again

Again, I like the idea behind this - writing a poem about not writing poems. But it's too heavy-handed just here, right in the start of the poem. Too much information - gives too much away and leaves little up to mystery and imagination. Which is a shame, since the poem could benefit from a healthy dash of subtlety.

for your heart is cold and stone.
You take my precious loving gift,

A cold and stone heart, a precious loving gift...I feel like I've heard this many times before. It's not new; moreover, that's exactly what I expected from reading the first line, so absolutely no surprises there. It'd almost border on being boring, were it not for the da-di-da-di-da rhythm going throughout.

and use it like a laundry rag

This I appreciated. I've never seen poetry, expression of words, love, call it what you will, symbolised by a laundry rag - of all the marvellous things in life - before. It caught my eye. In fact, I'd love to see it used further; expanded upon, explored, analysed, made more colourful. Perhaps even switch the poem around, so that instead of being blatantly obviously about loss of love leading to loss of poetry, we instead see the person to whom the poem is addressed wiping down a 'wall of poetry' with this laundry rag, or maybe wiping a 'red wall' (rather obviously symbolic of love - but I'm sure you can come up with something more creative; these are just ideas, after all ). This would make it more subtle, and leave more up to the reader's imagination (and show off more of yours).

But what I forever truly feel,
will be locked away for good.
For I have loved and now have lost,
and fear to pain again.

Too obvious. Too much telling and not enough showing. I'm sure you've heard that before, so I'll elaborate on what that really means: more imagery, more symbolism, abstraction, metaphor and less 'reality,' clarity and bluntness here would lift it out of its all-too-obvious monologue. It's an intriguing idea - lost love leading to lost creativity; but, like I said, the only way to show loss of creativity in an interesting way in a poem is to be creative. Ironic, but then again, so is the poem.

Forever deeply I shall feel,
that I have loved you so.
But you shall never feel the same,
and only hatred show.

Not that rhyme is inherently bad either - it's just also limiting to your central idea in the same way rhythm is, in that it's hard to get across the point when the last word in a line has to be a certain word to rhyme with the other one before it. And this last stanza was even more obvious than the second one - this felt like the message was being shoved down my throat, in all its Shakespearean end-the-act-and-scene-of-the-play-with-a-few-wise-words glory. Suffice to say, it worked in Elizabethan England, but in the context of the rest of the poem, seems like it tries too hard.

So...I hope that has been helpful for you and if you have any questions or want to discuss anything, feel free to PM me. I'd be more than happy to assist.

Hey king,

This particular poem I didn't quite enjoy. Unlike your other poems, this one didn't give of that feeling of dread and despair or, like your others, depression. It felt more of rage which struck me as odd coming from you. One thing which I feel that you NEED to change is this line:

for your heart is cold and stone.

This one line is really frustrating me! It makes sense but, for me, it would make better sense if it said for your heart is cold as stone. For all those people who disagree, I disagree with the disagree. And if you disagree with the disagreed disagreed. Well, I disagree.

Other than that, I felt that this poem wasn't at all enjoyable.

MWAHAHAHA!
-RepublicOfCoter