Hello fangirldivergent46,
So I'm going to have to disagree with TZH. I think what you do well in the poem is setting up the metaphor for us to follow. You allow us to know up front what you're going to be talking about and that provides us a good starting point for investigating the future claims you present.
But I do find this poem predictable. There's a Frost poem that's pretty famous called "The Road Less Traveled" and it has the same metaphor of "life is like a road" and so do many other poems that are older even. This is not a new theme, or a new idea. That means you have to do something unique with the theme to really warrant a whole new poem about the same subject. The reason being, you're entering a dialogue with the rest of the poetry writers and if you're just agreeing with what they say, then you'd better do it in a paraphrased way that's unique and yields a new idea, or expands upon an idea that's already been supported. You can't just say "Yup! This is what I think." you have to add.
I felt like you were going to do this by using modern language to explore the idea of the roads of life, until I realized that the reason you used "jerks" was just for the rhyme. That was incredibly disappointing because I was expecting this to be free verse allowing you to really go into any detail about the roads we travel and not adhere to the rhymes. When you did start rhyming, the rhymes themselves were somewhat shaky. You don't have them consistently mostly because you don't even have consistent stanza sizes. Your first one's 6, with an abcded rhyme scheme, meaning that the last line should rhyme with two up, at all times. Where do your other rhymes come into play? Stanza 2 we jump down to 4 lines, so 2 and 4 should rhyme. They do, but the stanza itself is very lack luster. It's not very detailed about this idea of jerks being on the path of life, it's more of a broad-spectrum saying that just happens to rhyme. Stanza 3 we're at 6 again, so 4 and 6 should rhyme, but they don't, instead you've changed the pattern up to abacde with 1 and 3 rhyming. That completely breaks the pattern we had going in the first two stanzas.
The reason I dislike this is because it makes the poem feel lazy. I'm sure you put a lot of effort into writing it, but because you allowed your pattern to break like that, it feels like you didn't know where you were going and you didn't bother editing it to make the stanzas agree with one another.
My recommendation would be to rewrite this poem without the rhyme scheme. Right now I am not exactly sure what the point you were trying to express was, and it's lack-luster. If you rewrote this, and didn't focus on rhyming or sounding poetic, but really talked to us as your audience, sat your reader down over dinner, and explained your beliefs about life through metaphor and poetic devices like "life is like a road" then I think you'd end up having a more communicative poem. You'd have my attention rather than letting it dwell on the rhymes.
Poems don't need rhymes, they don't need rhymes like they don't need to have the first letter of every line capitalized, or punctuation at the end of every line. Rhyming every moment of a poem just isn't necessary any more and usually if it is included, it's internal unless they're using some sort of structure like a sonnet.
Anyway, that's what I have to recommend, and I hope you can see where I'm coming from and I really do want to see what you have to say about this topic despite it being a topic that's already been done to death. I think if you really ran with lines 1-4 and just kept writing without rhymes from there, you'd have a really interesting and emotionally charged poem.
I hope to see the results of a rewrite.
Aley
Points: 1883
Reviews: 806
Donate