Hey there lunargirl. I saw this was still sitting in the green room so I decided to drop on by.
My first concern about this poem is the lack of formatting. I'm guessing from the rhyme scheme you've made and the way that you've arranged the lines that you probably had some form of stanzas in place. The Publishing Center likes to take formatting out of poems when you copy/paste from another source so for solutions to this, consider looking at my recent tutorial on How to Format Poetry on YWS .
I've copied your poem down below with my approximation of how it might be split into stanzas based on what I've seen. I also corrected any basic typos I saw like the misspelling of "passed". Double checking for typos and misspellings before posting is one of the easiest things you can do to make your poem easier to read.
There is nothing left between you and I,
even though our love used to be
as endless as the sky.
I think shorter stanzas would work best for this poem because there's nothing too grabbing for the audience when it's all mixed together. You're trying to go for some sort of rhyme scheme at different points in this poem so that's something you need to decide on being consistent/inconsistent from the beginning. I'm not sure if you were being intentional with the rhyming word choice, but I think it might take away from the overall feeling of the poem.
Years have passed, and it's hard to forget,
all the memories that you and I once had.
A clear amount of mourning between the narrator and the subject of the poem. I can see what you're trying to do but I can't feel the emotion. That's definitely the portion of this poem that you need to work on - emotional impact on the audience.
But I push them back, because I'm not ready
to look at the past.
Tell the audience why you don't want to look at the past. Loose statements about regret over lost loves are commonplace in poems. The way you keep the audience's attention is giving them a reason to be interested in the story between the narrator and subject of their affection.
But I will never forget, that our love never did last,
even when I gave everything up for you,
it was never enough.
And that's how I lost everything all at once,
and felt broken for months.
These two sections are fairly similar so I can see them being combined in someway. I think a bit of reordering of some lines of your poem would be appropriate moving forward as you're stitching together all of your ideas for the final project.
I will never meet anyone that I can love,
because I pored my heart out to you,
and you never gave it back.
This section is good. This is the strength that I want to see throughout the entire poem.
You left me broken and bruised,
and I will never be whole again.
You're beginning to get into the damage but it's still clearly lacking. There's no how and why to the ways that the narrator has been damaged, we just know that they think it's a permanent condition. You can have a moping, mournful poem that thinks of what happened before, but there has to be a reason.
This is who I am now,
this is what you made me into to,
a person just like you,
tarnished and used,
until there is nothing left,
except a ghost with a heatless chest.
The last section of lines is definitely your strongest section. I think a greater concentration on this idea, and shaping the others around it, would lead to an overall poem with more power. Focusing on what the speaker has become after the object of their desires has damaged them in some way is something that many readers would be able to relate to and would certainly draw your readers in more.
So this is a good starting point and with a little bit of work, I think you could create a much stronger poem.
Happy Februrary.
- Jack
Points: 650
Reviews: 766
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