Hide and Seek

I love the meaning of this poem. It makes me feel like if you hadn't turned your back, you friends wouldn't have done that. I also like the surprise. I expected a friendly poem. Holy cow was I wrong. What struck you to write such a powerful piece?

I love the meaning of this poem. It makes me feel like if you hadn't turned your back, you friends wouldn't have done that. I also like the surprise. I expected a friendly poem. Holy cow was I wrong. What struck you to write such a powerful piece?

Hello chaser! Here from Phee Phi Pho Phum to review!

This was quite an interesting poem. I really like the concept you laid out here of turning away and letting your friends do terrible things.

I am conflicted on your use of rhyme. Normally I hate it. It ruins the poem because it makes the author think "hmm, well I used this word, so my next line has to end in a word that rhymes... how can I force it to do that?" and so the lines end up being forced and awkward and much less strong than they could have been previously. this poem is no exception. The rhymes, while better than some poems, are still pretty forced, and I'm pretty sure you'd be able to get your point across better if you didn't have to follow the rhyme pattern. However, this is a dark poem involving children's games. The rhyme and the rhythm (which I will mention later) give the poem a sort of sing-song-y, jump-rope chant feel. And I like that. It's good. So I'm conflicted. Perhaps you could go through and see if you could have the poem rhyme in an abac pattern? Currently it's aaab. Just to make things feel less forced.

So. Rhythm. You established a rhythm with your first stanza.
But the first line of your second stanza breaks it, and it sounds really awkward. Perhaps you could change to something like, "you find him in the dark abyss"
Another troublesome line is "Selling her soul in silent despair," which you can change to "she sells her soul in deep despair" or something along those lines.

The whole fourth stanza, minus the last line, doesn't fit the rhythm. Figure out how to change it, because I'm not sure.

Also this line: "Hidden behind bars for mortal sin," messing with the rhythm again, and I think you might mean "of mortal sin" because that makes a little more sense.

The final line also disrupts the rhythm, but as the last line, it's good to have something that makes it different from the rest, so there's no need to change it.

Rhythm makes the flow, and if you have any sort of rhythm, it's important to keep it consistent or it just all goes poorly in the end.

Something else about this poem is that the "friends" and their actions are really cliche. You use really cliche language to talk about them. We've heard these stories before. We can guess at what you're going to say. And that's not good. I advise you to perhaps make their stories less cliche.

I hope this helped! Let me know if you have any questions!
Keep writing!
~fortis

Phee Phi Pho Phum, I'm going to review until you're numb.

I'm Editor, reviewing for team Phee Phi Pho Phum! Nice to meet you! I love your poem. It might just be my personal preference, but each line is unnecessarily begun with a capitalized letter and it bugs me a little. In some of your lines, it is necessary, but in a few lines, it is not. If the line starts with the beginning of a sentence, if the word at the start of the line is a proper noun, or if the line starts with the word "I," it is necessary to capitalize it and when the beginning of the line is not one of these three things, you do not need to do that.

... Excuse me. I have to go. Somewhere there is a grammar crime happening.

Hi! Blablabl92 here!

So I started to read this poem thinking this was about cheerful things like hide and seek...then I continued to read and boy, was I wrong. XD

Anyways, even though its a tad dark and disturbing, this poem is still very well written and I like your narrative. It's cheerful, even though its about something like death.

The only thing that I would change is the first stanza,
"Close your eyes; count to ten.
When you open them again,
You'll find yourself alone and then,
You'll try to find your friends."

Because of the beginning, it's not very smooth, so I would suggest adding "and" or "but" in front of the second line. Other than that, I like the rhyme scheme.

Finally, I just wanted to say that I loved your vocabulary such as "reminisce" and you're eye for details! (Even if they were about death...)

Keep writing!

....That was dark. I liked it a lot, and I couldn't find any grammatical errors. Dark poetry is usually the thing I like to read, so I obviously was snared on the second stanza. I loved how you made it all a childish game of hide and seek. First you find one of your friends as an alcoholic, then...not completely sure about the third stanza, but I think she may be prostitute??? The a dead guy. Lastly is someone you knew who went to prison. All very serious matters in the real world, but in this poem you made it seem like they were all hiding behind these events in their lives and they're still children. Nice work!!