Welcome to YWS!
I was surprised to find that I quite liked this poem; usually poetry entitled "Hate" ends up being a mish-mash of badly rhymed verses, and it was nice to see something original.
That doesn't mean there isn't work to be done, however.
Firstly, your line breaks bother me. It could be the lack of punctuation - I mean, you have a couple of commas scattered about, and you have question marks, but the rest is just kind of left on its own. I would definitely advise adding some punctuation in there as a guide for the reader. More than that, however, sometimes there are breaks where the flow of ideas does not appear to need one. You could possibly try reformatting something like this:
The hatred, I can feel,
Is slowly draining away -
Little by little, day by day. (1)
I can feel the warmth slowly returning
The anger miraculously ebbing away
My days are no longer a nightmare
There again in my life is light. (2)
How can I tell you how much you are healing me?
Why do your lies feel so right?
I’m trusting you against my better judgment,
Though I known what I’m doing is wrong,
I wonder if the reason you hurt me
Was because I was hurting you. (3)
You must fix whatever you’ve broken
And the only one who can fix me is you
The rest of the world can hate me
As long as I know that you don’t (4)
So please even if you do still hate me
I beg keep lying to my face (5)
So that at least I’ll have peace in an illusion
Peace at the end of the day
It might help to give it some more cohesion, if you see what I mean.
As to the poem itself, some lines are stronger than others. I love the overall idea of asking someone to lie to you so you can pretend everything is OK - very relatable. However, there are parts where I feel you lose the plot and other parts where you go on a little too long about one idea.
Since I don't want to repost the poem again, I've highlighted the parts I think need to be worked on in red above and numbered them so I can tell you what the problem is.
(1) These lines are made redundant by the whole "Warmth slowly returning" idea and I think the latter is the better written; I like the image of warmth/friendship as a kind of tide and I think it adds strength to the poem. IMHO, those first four lines are unnecessary and should be cut.
(2) Exaggerated, and badly worded. If you must talk about how great this is, I suggest you keep it simple and link it back to the sea/tide imagery in the previous lines somehow.
(3) This made me go "WTF?" and do a double-take. As someone who has no idea of the context this poem reflects, these lines look like trite and pointless platitudes to your reader. Either be specific - "perhaps you stole my boyfriend because I flirted with yours" - or get rid of it.
(4) This concept seems garbled to me, and the idea of "fixing what you've broken" is a little cliche. Try to branch out a little, and really focus on what you mean. You've mentioned healing; perhaps you could go back to that. Bring a little consistency in, it will strengthen the poem a lot.
(5) Minor nit-pick: I think this would sound better as "I beg you, keep lying to my face".
Hope that helped. As I said before, it's nice to see an original poem about hatred and I think this has a lot of potential. Happy editing!
Cheers,
~bubbles
Points: 10087
Reviews: 701
Donate