Young Writers Society

Whoa, haven't been on here for months! Got to get back on the band wagon, haha; Here's a little something, a first part in a sequence of poems i've made.

The moon is old; but is unattainable. No man can mine, refine or devine it to the gods, but they can see, feel and be it.

That golden glow shows them the truth of the night, the plight and the not-so-rights of this world and that burns, hurls, and churns their stomachs.

Treasured beauty and wealthy brutality, that it promises, is took by no man, but by his shadow.

It steals the glow, as it goes, nobody knows what to do; they grow accustomed, sequinned and beaten by this fact.

Their back, which they can not visage or pillage, takes the one thing that cannot, though they would lie, and deny this.

In the night, the darkness, sadness and madness takes light and by will and might, the best withstand it.

The weak and the meek seek to do the same and fail; How sad it is to be a man in the day, blocked by their own dark mind.

The moon is old; it see's the pain, the insane, the untame, the repetitive patterns of a world turned plain.

It starts to feel less alone.

[highly under construction, alot can be changed here, i understand that, i'd be grateful to any ideas/criticism]

Certainly a good base for construction.

Pronoun trouble: most of the pronouns I found very difficult to conclusively link back to a noun or nouns. Clarity is really hurt; also, some of them are inaccurate when less obtuse, i.e. "a man in the day" blocked by "their" own dark mind.
"see's" in the second-to-last stanza should be "sees," no apostrophe.

Mind your punctuation. For the most part it looks fine, nothing that really trips me up, but do remember your Oxford commas (the last comma in phrases like "x, y, and/or z"). You tend to leave them out, and that creates ambiguity of the negative variety. For example: "the darkness, sadness and madness" implies that "sadness and madness" are in fact what "the darkness" is, not individual concepts/creatures/etc.
As to overall punctuation, I'm tempted to say that you over-punctuate, but it is something of a must given your form. If you had traditional line breaks and so forth, or were crafting this as stream-of-consciousness, in that case I would recommend dropping some of your bounteous punctuation. As is, it is necessary and also gives your piece an irregular beat. So good eye.

Imagery is a bit simple, but grandiose, which allows you some apparent fanciness without much actual fanciness (like a plain person in a stunning outfit, I suppose one might say). Nice callback/bookend with "The moon is old," by the way. Again, a simple trick that happened to add a lot of style.

The tone is iffy... I can't make one out. The narrator is not really present - I felt throughout as though his/her words were being supplied by someone else, say an author. Although the consistency was there, it fell flat. Couldn't really tell you why, though... mostly a gut feeling. But re-reading with that in mind, I think one of the reasons that is so is the lack of carry-over between 'stanzas.' I could take out just about any of the 'stanzas' and the poem wouldn't really change in tone or meaning. So it just seems monotonous despite the nice language.

All in all, a good beginning, and I can certainly see it becoming great. Keep writing!

Hmm, something to sink my teeth into!

So, my biggest issue is that this doesn't feel poetic to me, at least not yet and not all of it. Your structure makes it feel like prose-poetry, but I don't think you have a meter or rhythm really set for it. Part of what makes prose-poetry not prose, for me, is the rhythm, the cadence of the words entirely separate from how they fall on the page. So, if you don't mind me playing? Just a bit of what I mean, using your first stanza.

The moon is old, unattainable; what no man can mine, refine or devine [divine?] to the gods, but they can see, feel and be.

To poke at it further, you have some parallels set up in your use of threes, but it falls off-kilter with "to the gods" and "feel," since you set up the precedent of rhyme.

In general, the use of parallel structure coupled with rhyming words falls flat - personally, I'm not sure why you're using either - the endless synonyms are repetitive, and the rhyme ends up feeling entirely forced to me.

However, you could do a lot with parallel structure, if you do something a bit different with it. Rather than on the sentence level, what if you do something on stanza level? For instance, you have "In the night, the darkness, sadness and madness takes light and by will and might, the best withstand it." Why not do "In the night, the darkness..." and fill it in. Then "In the night, the sadness..." etc. That's still a clunky, to be sure, but it's definitely another way to structure this, preserving some of the structure you're favoring, while making it more than just a list.

Anyway, you also have this triad throughout that could be played up if you want, or even just used to be restructured a bit to be more effective, which also frees you up to explore a bit more the imagery you've started, but haven't fully developed.

Happy editing, and if you need anything PM me!