Young Writers Society

Casa,

If you start your line with "can't" then, "cease" should be "ceases" in your second line to keep everything present-tense.

Man.

I guess that messes up your syllable-count, huh?



This is the beauty of structured poetry, the ability to rewrite and edit, and re-frame what you wish to say. I think you have the creative juices to fix this and be grammatically correct.

"Whenever" in this poem doesn't help you much though. The word "whenever" is usually used as conjunction, only rarely used as an adverb and implies that the narrator does not care what time. Whenever is basically a short form of "from now until infinity" compare the sentence: "Whenever I get this car going, we'll go!" to your sentence. The use of "left" is clearly past-tense, and so syntactically the phrasing is weird and awkward. Plus, the sentiment doesn't ring true because the poem is written and so suggests the narrator cares very much so.

Also the use of "whenever" in this sentence is weird rhythmically. Consider the rhythm "wherever, whenever" and how that phrase has this undulating flow - unstress, stress, unstress, stress, unstress, stress, like a three-beat drum. Well, that beat in this poem is all over the place. Maybe: "from the time you left" works better?

Hope this helps.

~ as always, Audy

Ceased.

This is a senryu as it uses a human scenario to describe the human condition as opposed to a scene from nature to capture a juxtaposed pair of thoughts, evoking a comparative new thought. That said, despite it meeting the traditional syllabic requirements, it still lacks in the traditional flow setup of the haiku and senryu, and it doesn't deliver much--or any, in my case--emotional impact.

My shorthand advice would be to consider going about this in the haiku style and describe this feeling by taking two images from nature and weaving them together so that the final, independent line evokes this emotion of having a dead heart. Even the thought process behind it would be healthy to explore so that it could give you fuel for more poetry in the future.

If you'd like to workshop the ins and outs of a haiku, catch me around the site or in PM and we can hit up a pad or a thread somewhere. A good starting place issss this gem by Karzkin, an old poet who doesn't show up anymore.

Hope this helps,
Ty

I don't see quite a bit of haiku poems on here so I commend you on being unique in this aspect. Haiku poems can be a bit tricky with content and what lines would work with what and so on and so on. First off, you've got your 5 7 5 right, so that's great haha. Second off, I love your first two lines, they fit perfectly together. But your last line lacks a bit of je ne sais quois. It would have been fine if it was in the middle of a regular poem but the last line of a haiku has to leave the reader feeling satisfied. Maybe you could rhyme the last word or make it sound similar to the two previous lines? You've got bleed and beat, which work well together because they start with B's and have that E sound in the middle. You've got really good potential in this.