Purple Rose of Cairo

Hey, Viv here to do a review.

Let me just say that I love this poem. You do enjambment very well so the flow is smooth, and the word choice of your first line is an immediate hook as is the title. It's a story poem that
s like a really short epic but the tone makes it pick up like song.

As for grammar, you are consistent in keeping every few lines like three long sentences, except for the last stanza where there is no ending punctuation and this line here "Once you fall a slave to your own heart.'" The apostrophe at the end is a tiny thing, but still.

Will you say what inspired this one?

Keep writing~

Hey, Aley here to review for Team BlueBerry Muffins~

First off, I have to admit that this poem took me a couple times to read through it and really figure out why I was bothering to read it.

It reads really smoothly, sort of like reading a pamphlet or a book back, but it isn't something I'd naturally elect to read and study for fun. I think I figured it out though.

You did a really good job with the flow of the poem. That makes it easy to read. The way that you do the end of your lines naturally pushes the reader into the next line despite the line capitalization. You also are very descriptive with what's going on even if you do have a few contradictions [ex: if it's night, why is the sky blue?], and you have a good turn of phrase when you're taking us more into the story with the vernacular language. It doesn't fit the rest of the poem, but it does follow the rhyme you're trying to fit and it also has a more direct address to the audience giving it that homey feel.

The thing is, I don't really know what this poem is trying to say in terms of something I care about. Usually I have something I take away from a poem, but this one leaves me kind of flat. You mention falling slave to your heart, and I can relate that to not falling for materialism, but none of the rest of the poem talks about that in any applicable way for me. Basically the poem says "a guy goes into the desert and wanders around" and then "if you're materialistic, beware" and then "You see, this other guy wandered around in the desert for a long time too," but they don't actually feel like they follow one another in context. It feels like you have a logical fallacy here trying to say that the reason they wander in the desert is materialistic, when in reality, the first man is looking for "someone" not something. Being materialistic about a person is general considered slavery, which does tie into that line, but if that's the case, then that line doesn't mean don't be materialistic, it means don't try to find your actualized self, but if we don't work towards our idealised self, what do we work towards? The poem doesn't tell us.

In fact, the poem at the end seems to take more of a materialistic standpoint talking about this object that the heroes are trying to obtain. It is almost like the poem is trying to say materialism over self-actualization. That's not something I agree with, and not something the poem convinced me to feel, so it falls flat.

All in all, you have a good way of writing poems, but I think you need to look at a different subject matter. Try writing a poem about something that could happen in real life which is a metaphor for something you want to talk about instead. Don't couch it in history and it will also be more relatable.