Hey there! Here to review! Doing some last minute RevMo Reviews.
So first a quick comment on ellipses (...) in poetry you are free to use punctuation however you see fit as the "rules of grammar" are more suggestions / guidelines than fences, and sometimes it's more meaningful to break down conventions than to keep them, but typically when using ellipses - it is made of three dots rather whereas in your poem you kind of just added several and changed up the number in a few places. Also an ellipses is generally used to mark hesitation, dramatic pause, a trailing thought, or can be used as like a "fill in the blank" pause. In your poem you seemed to be using them for subject breaks rather than any of the ordinary usages. The problem with ellipses is unlike a question mark which is pretty consistent on it's meaning - an ellipses has so many different ones that it's unclear for a reader which to take often, and then just breaks up the poem awkwardly. I'd strongly discourage using them in poems unless there is a specific reason you are. But I'm biased against them, so take it with a grain of salt.
As far as your poem's meaning, it appears that the poem is about a person who is really carefully considering the theme of friendship. It was a tad confusing to follow their exact string of logic, but I believe they were saying, "hey don't be so gullible in who you trust as you friend! You don't want someone to poison you right? It's really tricky to discern who will be faithful to you in friendship forever." Now that's a pretty unique theme that I haven't seen a poem based on before, nice!
In some ways the repeated questioning form reminded me of a Platonic dialogue. In fact, Plato I think even had some dialogues or writings on friendship so that really fits pretty well. The rhetorical questions were a bit hard to understand in this format though, and I actually wonder if this poem would be better written in prose or parable form. I think the point of discerning friendship would be greatly improved by giving an example or two of the situations discussed, so a prose-revision may just be the way to go.
As a poem, I think you did a nice job bringing some specificity to this philosophical discussion - with the poisoning example etc. People tend not to like to read long strings of internal dialogue in poetry if it's not rooted in description or outward action, because it begins to feel a bit boring unless the emotions being discussed are particularally interesting or connected to some implied narrative. You might want to think about how you can introduce more action into the poem as it is, or at least more poetic devices like metaphor.
Your formatting as far as line breaks seemed pretty polished, and I didn't mind your capitalization of a few unconventional words to sort of highlight their importance, that's definitely fitting in this sort of philsophical-genre poetry too.
Overall, I think there are some improvements that could be made, but you've got a solid theme to work with here.
all the best,
alliyah
Points: 144125
Reviews: 1227
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