Welcome to Yewis umutoni. =)
Not sure exactly where to start. Frankly, this reads like prose.
Now, what exactly is the difference between poetry and prose?
Part of it has to do with the structure. In prose you use a grammatical structure your readers are familiar with, to remove unnecessary ambiguity.
But in poetry, the structure has a purpose other than merely clarifying content. It at least makes the content more attractive and appealing, but it is also important to the flow of ideas. Some poetry is highly structure, follows rules of meter etc. Poetic rules seem made to be broken, though. When it comes to structure, it takes creativity. The way you organize your ideas here looks like paragraphs, rather than stanzas.
That removes the difficulty of worrying about line breaks, but isn’t that just lazy?
Whether you divide your lines at punctuation, or in the middle of a phrase, it can be highly useful. You can divide a sentence in a specific place to put emphasis on a word. You can play with punctuation to change the interpretation of a sentence completely.
To put it plainly, your poem doesn’t look like a poem. It might sound like a poem, but the format you have it in detracts from that as well.
I’m going to rearrange your lines completely at random, to give you an example of how you could achieve a look that adds to the ideas in your poem (notice how separating a word by itself adds emphasis):
I am here again,
the same square tile I stood on before I
left.
The fear was crippling and
the thought of going on only weakened my heart.
Stripped naked,
standing in front an audience that was not there,
I felt searching eyes feel my every curve,
raising the tiniest hairs that lay on my skin.
But
here I am
again, looking through the fog ahead of me.
I know this place too well.
I know it like I know the difference between heart and mind.
I want to be here and I want to turn back
and run.
When did the fear leave me?
Its protective shield,
its movement without passion,
when did I start to
listen to myself?
All of a sudden my heart cannot wait,
it challenges all elements:
time,
wind and
(unfortunately) mind.
All of a sudden everything is overwhelmingly beautiful.
It all makes too much sense
that its hard to believe. With my emotions,
time can be slowed down
like the soft dullness of an early morning sky,
it can be quicken like an illusion.
Here I am again, the same square tile I stood on before I left.
Now, it’s not just format and structure that changes prose to poetry. Poetry might be ambiguous at times, but it also has a clarity of wording and brevity different from the way you organize and continue ideas in prose.
Even as I was rearranging the lines, the phrases were long and wordy. There are a lot of additional words that add nothing to the poem. In a poem, every word, every syllable, every punctuation mark, every pause must be essential. You can’t have anything superfluous. You could cut out half the words and convey the same thoughts more eloquently.
The basis of poetry is a metaphor. I think you could concentrate on that more in this piece. You tell us again and again what the subject is feeling, but you don’t show us. There is no picture to see, hardly any description of their emotions.
Take for example these lines:
I know this place too well.
I know it like I know the difference between heart and mind.
I want to be here and I want to turn back
and run.
“I know this place too well.” What place? And how well do you know it? Give us something to show their familiarity with it. If someone was to ask you how well you know your house, you could probably tell them things about it nobody else would know. You could do the same thing here.
“I know it like I know the difference between heart and mind.” What is the difference, according to this person, between heart and mind? And how do they know it?
“I want to be here and I want to turn back and run.” This statement should give the reader a feeling of conflict of mind, yes? And why does this person want to run?
There are some things that can be left to a readers own interpretation, and should be. But I shouldn’t be able to find that many questions.
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1170978 I found some interesting, helpful opinions here on the subject of poetry vs. prose that will hopefully help you differentiate and find the best way to re-shape your piece.
To sum up, the things that most need to be worked on before you can really fix anything else are:
Structure
Eliminating wordiness; I would shorten your sentences, and cut out any words that are not absolutely essential
Put more emphasis on the metaphor in the piece, and add more description.
This requires a lot of work. To be honest, it left me emotionally void without even knowing what I was suppose to feel at the end.
The point of this escaped me as well. I couldn’t make head or tails of the subject.
If after some revision you want more help on this, feel free to PM me.
_Nam
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