The Men

Two immediate matters that need to be rectified before this can be digested properly:

1. The formatting and line breaks demand a momentum akin to a train rushing forward that you wish the reader to keep up with. This is bad, and for the sake of the readers' lung health, I'd highly suggest cutting the line breaks in a decent half (if not more) to make for a slower-paced and more easily-read poem. The rhymes will maintain their value* and your meter will transpose into the new format equitably.

2. Your demand for rhyme slaughters so much potential value you could otherwise present with the piece, and if given the chance, I'd await a freer version with bated breath.

Your message is very decent. The narrator is in control of his own destiny (which is philosophically debatable), and he has an Ebeneezer Scrooge-like happening where he sees a branch in the timeline, so to speak. It's a concept that could go pretty far, but the execution is far from palatable, and you have an incredible amount of work to put in before you accomplish much in the way of motivation.

Beyond the realm of execution, your presentation and wording, pacing, and phrasing (because of rhyme*) makes for a very convoluted journey that doesn't have anything resembling a body until the final five lines. That said, this has an entirely singular purpose, and for that matter it takes up an incredible amount of room FOR that purpose, and that's displeasing. Long poetry doesn't go very far for this reason (as a measuring act, not an umbrella judgment).

You have good ideas and a means to get there, but you need to put more care into your execution before presenting.

Hope this helps,
Ty

Hello.

I feel the structure of this poem makes it hard to get your message across. Part of it could be the formatting, and if you had originally formatted it differently disregard this comment, but I would have found this a lot clearer with stanza breaks to separate each of the men. If you're not sure how to get them visible on YWS, hold down the shift key when pressing the enter key to make a "soft return", that will not generate a paragraph break between lines.

Outside of stanzas, I'm wondering why you had each line be a very short, choppy sentence. While this is rather effective in bringing about a rushed mood in the short term, by emphasizing everything in this way for a rather long poem, you end up making everything one note. This quote emphasizes the importance of sentence variety by a demonstrative example, and I would suggest applying the principles of the quote to what you're working on here.

I would also consider blending lines into each other, so you don't have complete sentences on each individual line. It is not absolutely required to have punctuation on every single line of a poem, and in some cases, can actually hamper the poem instead of help it. This article goes into the different ways you can punctuate poetry.

So all in all, I can see where you're trying to go with this— the panic of futures laying out and having to pick one right away— but because it's all panic and all choppy, there's no actual punch to the words. When everything is panic, nothing is panic, and you need a variety of feelings to generate depth.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

~Rosey