Young Writers Society

Hey there! Welcome to YWS! I'm Tuck, here for a quick review

It will haunt me 'till I'm dead and dust

The combination of "dead and dust" strikes me as peculiar here. It's a combination of something literal and something figurative together, and it doesn't really mesh for me.

I'm in confusion

"In confusion" also doesn't sound right. I love the rhyming of "delusion" and "confusion", but I think you need to reword this, maybe say "in a state of confusion"

I don't WANT to be afraid, it's the way I'm made

I think that italicizing "want" would make it look less aggressive than the capitalization while still conveying your point. It might also be better to use a semicolon instead of a comma there for grammatical purposes.

Overall Thoughts

I thought this was a beautiful poem about reluctance to fall in love while also recognizing how deep your feelings go for this person (the "you" referring to the speaker in this poem). I liked the third stanza's insistent that this isn't love and the beautiful expression of reluctance to fall in love and the delusion/confusion that resulted because of that.

However, I didn't understand the poetic choice to use bullet points. It's definitely interesting and a format I haven't seen before, and I think you could do a lot with that format, but it didn't seem to add anything to the poem from my perspective. It didn't feel like a script, either, because it wasn't a dialogue or a description of a play. It was a poem from one perspective, with some interesting formatting choices (especially towards the end, going a little unconvential with the monosyllabic lines was a good choice & really worked).

I think you could also do some more with capitlization—you seemed to capitalize most of the lines except for the last two, but I think that doing it in a more sentence format would give it more of the flow that you're going for. It'll also contribute to the style of the poem and whether you want it to feel more informal and casual or structured like a formal poem, although either way using capitals sparingly and carefully will improve your poem.

Hopefully some of these thoughts were helpful, and I'd be happy to provide clarification on any of these points. Let me know if there's anything else I can help you with, and I hope you enjoy your time on YWS! Keep writing!

~MJTucker