This is engineered (yes, engineered) with Aley’s review on the following work in mind:
A Lack of Sadness on a Happy Day
=====================================
What muse had inspired this,
has left me.
I cannot touch it;
sacrosanct, it stands as memory
in the high, imagined annals
of my mind.
Which creature hence adore it
lay praise upon the moment
for I, the author,
cannot
take
credit.
I wrote it—
ah, but
it wrote
itself
using
such weak proxy
as
has lost it
from his ability.
This
free-verse
is bound
to the…
the rhymes
in my head.
They carry
my
thought.
And I
am empty
without.
Gray,
sand;
bridges,
bands;
efforts land
me
out
of
hand.
How can I
simply not rhyme?
What foolhardy craft
should lack proper time.
I do not understand
what pain this end
does means employ;
quite cruel
its salvo
against this
wretched boy.
What stupid murder
against
my poetic nature—!
Ecology
break me —
corrosive
down —
explosive
into this —
toxic
new form; produces —
excuses
lines of music;
I sing not a word
I, unstirred-
Ah! This is madness, that
anyone in this world
insists on the bland-
ness
of poetry, rhyme-
less...
Prejudice, damn this!
But how can they
follow the words
I am bothered
to play for them
here on this page
to consider this
means to the passion
I lose in the writing
as it flows without…
without… rhyming
Still, I’d be
damn’d
to admit it
or to require
my old works
to fit it
so no; I
will not budge,
nor return blow
to kindliness
for perhaps
with its unique remit
this form will
find me use…
just not yet.
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
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125,005 Literary Works • 672,798 Reviews
This was fantastic. I honestly had music playing in my head as I started reading it, maybe because this poem is so rhythmic and vivid. You controlled these aspects very well through the structure of the poem, and you have inspired me to try something like this of my own. Thank you.
-Jon
Thank you.
I..I am sitting in utter silence and awe. I truly am.
So, this is the result?
I'm happy with it. Congrats. Even though you did rhyme, you did it in a way that wasn't suffocating. Instead, you created a poem full of anger, frustration, and resilience. This poem has a lot of emotion and created a dynamic of denial that is perfect for a poem on frustration. You'll probably look back on this sometime and go: Oh dude, this is really fun to read. It is really fun to read out loud.
So here's the critique: Lines. Now that you've experienced writing without the structure of a rhyme pattern, I think it is safe to say that you've grown. You put so much emotion in this piece that I feel you need to play with the line breaks.
Someone famous once said that a line in poetry needs to be able to stand alone, without the poem, and still be poetic in itself. This isn't really being shown in this poem, probably due to the short nature of each line. "ness" is just not something that is that poetic without the words around it. That being said, this style is used for visual poetry which you did explore in this poem. My favorite parts of the poem were when you explored visual poetry, creating a picture with the poem's words. You didn't have much that you could make to visualize frustration, but the indentation of the words does give the poem another dynamic and those lines are perfectly fine. For this poem, the other lines are fine too because short lines does make us read it faster, and frustration is quick.
However, for the future I would suggest keeping in mind that each line should be able to stand alone. It's a fun thing to look at when you're writing a poem.
Oh! Right, internal rhyme. This is something that I think you can really benefit from if you don't want to have a poem that rhymes at the end, just don't make it completely obvious. Practice hiding the rhymes when you do rhyme so people don't realize it rhymes unless they look. Frost was really good at this. Internal rhyme is something I'm pretty sure you're familiar with. It can make a poem that doesn't have a rhyme scheme, still rhyme. It's really fun to play with because then you can relate lines that don't even really have any relevance to one another through the rhyme.
Thanks for accepting my challenge.