She thought, he knew

...repetition... To be fair, you warned me in the subject line, so I'll do nothing more than acknowledge that it's there

The first stanza had a nice beat to it. In the second stanza, I'd eliminate "slight" so it becomes "She knew of his death wish". Over modifying things cause them to soften and lose their meaning after a while. Maybe in the following line, hyphenate "no life" to "no-life" or even "non-life" to make it more of a noun and a statement than an adjective subject to change.

The last line of the second stanza breaks rank with what's around it and instead of "He knew" it's "He didn't know", which makes it sound a little odd. Unless you want to emphasize this point, in which case, I'd suggest doing the same one (maybe two) other places so it doesn't seem awkward/like a mistake.

Fourth stanza: morbid. Don't like. But that's just my opinion, you can disregard this paragraph.

Fifth stanza: still morbid. See above paragraph for elaboration

I think the biggest problem here was that by the end, I didn't know the characters involved/ about the characters involved any better than at the beginning, and as such, had few feelings of sadness when the girl died at the end, and few sympathies for the boy's guilt.

I liked your poem a lot, even the repetition.
Depressing, though.

wow sure is a little depressing but I liked it. Good job!

ML,
Oregongirl

How about:

"She thought she
had a death wish,
had no life,
lived in darkness;
he was her light,"

Cuts out the repetition.

As for the content, it's already been mentioned.

You said ignore repitition and I'm nice so I'm going to resist the urge to...resisting...

Okay. The poem covers an emotion I'll give you that but you have to reach deeper into that emotion. At the moment I can only see that this is a sad poem, I don't feel that it's a sad poem. I feel no loss at the characters death and, even with the knowledge that it's his fault, I feel no sympathy or anger towards the male character. I think you need to do what Snoink did. Step away from the format and tell us the story. Introduce us to the characters and then leave us to judge who's fault it was. Don't just say it was his fault because 'she' is at least partly to blame for taking her own life.

This made me think of a morbid song you jump rope to in elementary school xD but then I got upset when the rhyming didn't follow, or the rhythm was broke.

You told me to ignore the repetition. Okay. As a song to jump rope to: creepy. As a poem: I felt nothing.

Writing the poem from the third person really helps to get away from navel gazing, but you still have to put in the feelings. I know snoink already posted, but I'll steal one of her coined phrases, this is like a she/he thought/didn't/knew grocery list. Adds up to be a boring list of "things" and no emotion, or description or even a plot. (Yes, poems have plot!)

shouldn't be too hard to fix.

The main thing about this that makes me cringe is the ending. The ending has no conclusion. We don't know what his feelings are... in fact, she and he are really the only characters. Which is kind of sad because this is supposed to be a suicide poem and being such, supposed to evoke sympathy for the characters involved, but because of the lack of character interaction, it doesn't.

Get rid of the format -- you want to spend your words wisely by describing us what is going on with the characters so we can emphasize with them. Instead, give us descriptions and pretty metaphors of what's going on.

Hope that helps!

depressing. I dont know anything about poetry so...it evoked an emotion.

Sad.

That's what I know I'm sure someone else will be along to crush you later.