Just a Player

Well done! The emotions were conveyed so brilliantly. And I guess I shouldn't be saying 'well done'. To write like this you must have gone through it, like so many people, and heck that isn't a good thing. But your writing is wonderful.

One nitpick is just this line...

It was one big game,

Only to you.

You were the gamer,

I just played,

I'm not too sure why, so I can't be of much help (sorry!) but 'Only to you' just doesn't sound right when I read it. Maybe read through again and try to come up with an alternative phrase.

It was always a repeat.

This is great wording. To me it shouts out how there wasn't really anything special in the way they conducted the relationship. Everything was just so repetitive.

Okay, so that's all I have to say. Good job in writing this.

Hello, NatD! Since you did me the favor of reviewing two of my poems, I decided to drop by and review one of yours!

Queerelves already addressed the punctuation issues, and I completely agree. Punctuation should be used in poetry as it is in prose. If you need a comma in prose, you need one in the poem there. If you don't need one in the prose, you don't need one in the poem.

I also agree with queerelves' evaluation of the emotion and mood used in the poem. The narrator of the poem must have been feeling more than this if they wrote a poem about it. As it is, I'm getting rather bland emotion. Simply a telling of the emotions, rather than allowing the reader to sympathize with the emotions that the narrator is feeling in this poem. In order to do that, it is important to put in specific details. This poem is generic and it could be about anyone, which makes it impersonal and cold. Put details from the narrator's relationship and how it ended more specifically to garner an emotional response from the audience. You would be surprised at how little people actually feel when a poem is designed to be generic enough to let anyone be the main character.

While capitalization is a stylistic choice, I think you should read this helpful article on capitalization in poetry. Capitalizing the beginning of every line, as you have done, is not used as much in modern poetry as it was in older poetry. If you want to bring your poem out of the dark ages visually, I suggest using a different style of capitalization in your poem.

Some of the lines in your poem confused me as they really didn't have much to do with the rest of the poem. However, I realized that this was because some of your rhymes are forced.

You went for the dare.

Nowhere is it explained what the dare is. It simply mentions it and then pretends to forget about it. That is because, while writing the poem, you let the rhyme scheme take precedent over the meaning in the poem. In poetry, meaning takes priority over rhyme scheme. Unless you look at nursery rhymes, but those were written specifically as chants to entertain children. Which this is obviously not. There are a few other places in the poem where your rhyming turns forced. Be on the lookout for them.

Varying your sentence structure would really help this poem. It gets very repetitive and old after just a few lines because you use simple sentences the whole time. You connect them with commas, but really, most of the lines, grammatically speaking, should have periods at the end because they're complete thoughts. You use a few compound sentences, which I waited for eagerly, but the majority of the poem is either "You [did this]" or "I [did this]". Look how many times your lines start with I and you. Try to switch the words around in the sentence to add variety to the phrasing of your lines.

You were the gamer,
I just played,

This line confused me. Gamers play. And the narrator is saying that they played. Wouldn't they both be gamers? If you mean that the other person was more of an expert at the game, clarify it. To someone who isn't familiar with gaming jargon, both of them played the game at the same skill level.

The tone of the poem felt a little whiny at times. Perhaps you should focus on the deterioration of the relationship due to cheating rather than the narrator's feelings about it. I understand the pain of being cheated on very well, but I didn't really feel anything for the narrator because the tone was a little too self centered. Create a story out of it, rather than getting into the narrator's head. Show the world outside the narrator, and we will know their insides.

One last thing before I sign off. No genders are attached to the characters, and I think that even adding genders to the faceless characters would help create more of a story.

I hope that this review proves useful to you. Keep writing, and welcome to YWS! It's nice to meet you!

Hey! It looks like this is your first piece, so welcome to YWS; hopefully you're enjoying it so far. I'm going to break down my review into different sections, which I hope will cover all the different aspects of your poem.

Flow- Your poem would have flowed very well if it weren't for the punctuation at the end of every line. It's okay to have punctuation after lines, but some of the commas were unnecessary and they even made it confusing.

By the time I noticed,

You really didn't care,

The narrator is noticing that the person didn't care, correct? In that case, there shouldn't be a comma at the end of the first line. The comma changes the meaning of it. Instead of meaning that the narrator noticed that the person didn't care, it turns into the person not caring that the narrator noticed. If the latter is what you meant, keep the comma; otherwise, I would get rid of it.

I think that's the only grammatical issue that the commas pose, but the excessive punctuation really stands out to the reader (and not necessarily in a good way). Try taking out some of the punctuation for a more smooth look, or even try varying up the types of punctuation you use; maybe add some colons or semi-colons or dashes where they apply.

Formatting- This looks like it was meant to be divided up into stanzas, in which case I think YWS messed up the formatting. Since the formatting was probably messed up when you uploaded it, I can't say too much in this section because I'm not sure what it was meant to look like.

Meaning- You left this mostly open ended, making it so a lot of people can relate. It's rather vague, and it could apply to nearly anyone with a cheating/unfaithful significant other. Other than that, I'm not really sure to say for this section; there's nothing too notable about how you conveyed the meaning.

Mood and tone- You seemed to be lacking a little bit in this section. I would imagine you had a lot of emotions about the person this is about, but it didn't convey well. When I read this, I can't feel or even know your emotions to the extent I should be able to. Try using words with stronger connotation or stronger imagery.

Other- It's a bit odd to have an "other" section in the middle of a list, but I ordered it alphabetically so there's not too much I can do about that. Anyways, the only comment I had that would fall under "other" would be the punctuation, but I already addressed that.

Poetic devices- When I talk about poetic devices, I'm referring to these. I think this was probably your strongest point. You used a lot of metaphors, some hyperbole, and rhyming, and you used them well.

Word choice/phrasing- When I think about the word choice and phrasing in this poem, this is the first thing that stands out to me:

It was one big game,

Only to you.

You were the gamer,

I just played,

Two different games,

In five lines, you use a variant of "game" three times. It doesn't seem like this was done for effect, so I would suggest finding a synonym or another word to use in its place for at least one of the instances.

I think you did a good job with the rhyming scheme, because it doesn't seem like you chose any of the words you did solely because they rhymed. It's way too often that you'll see poetry with words that don't even make sense in the context they're in because the writer just wanted to make it rhyme.