Published January 17, 2012
Today my father died.
Gone, he was here yesterday.
Left me, my family.
Not a note or goodbye.
I walked down the street
Counted each car on every one of the trains that passed.
One hundred sixty four
I didn't spend even that many days with you.
My father died today, but only in my eyes.
He left for the other woman last night,
And breathes with her this morning.
Points:
Time spent:
IP address:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
Are you sure you want to delete this comment? This cannot be undone.
Mark this comment as a review? Points will be awarded to the poster.
Your comment was posted, but it wasn’t long enough to count as a review. Reviews need about four complete sentences (at least 250 characters). Try writing another review that explains your thoughts in more detail — the author will appreciate it, and you’ll earn points for it.
141,303 Literary Works • 674,338 Reviews
There are several issues with this stanza. The most noticeable of these is how every line ends in a period. This breaks the flow of ideas in this stanza, making them disjointed and difficult to follow. Now, while you could use the disjointedness to reinforce a feeling of brokenness, it's not really done well or completely in this stanza. On the one hand, you used too many periods, but looking at it another way, on the other hand, you didn't use enough.
If you were going for a feeling of disjointedness, a bit more careful placement of your periods would have helped, as would simplifying the structures of your phrases. For instance, one possibility:
Your subject is a powerfully emotive one, but you need to help your readers feel the emotions as they read the piece. You can accomplish this by supporting the emotions you want to convey with your word choice, sentence structure, and line/stanza breaks. How your readers read a line affects how they feel about the rest of the stanza, and by extension, the rest of the poem. Right now, if you were to simplify the language of this poem, make it reflect the feelings of abandonment and anger, this piece would be a very emotional and honest one.
This poem has a lot of potential, and it is so very close to being realized. It would be a shame if it never was.
This feels so honest.