Nice to see you around again :-)

But seriously, I can't think of a more poetically unforgiving username than <~> in the entire world. Damn these keyboards and their vast multitude of special characters, damn them to the deepest bow'ls of Microsoft.

I kind of liked 'nectarine'. I know it's not grammatically correct - unless the plant decided that nectarines would work as a good lure, and maybe they would - but he's described the sundew as 'she', so the feminine ending '-ine' gives a really creepy femme fatale tone to that section.

That being said, though, 'sweat her deadly pores' and 'sticky embrace' aren't nearly graceful enough to carry that idea to the end.

Sure. Find a solid structure for this - it's a sonnet; read some Shakespeare for the metre. For instance, 'unique radiant' doesn't work together very well. That may be down to accent differences I suppose (you're in the States, right?) but I'd be surprised if it was. In that passage, the stresses go 'u-NIQUE RA-diant' whereas classical Shakesperean sonnets were mostly (if not all) iambic pentameter which has a da-DUM da-DUM beat. That's not to say that all the words have to be bisyllabic, you can end one word on a weak ('da') ending and start the next on a strong ('DUM'). You'll also find that constraining yourself to a set metre will also help you find new words to use, and hopefully from there, a bit more inventiveness. 'I write this ode to you' is a good bit of iambic metre, although obviously not pentameter.

Definitely get rid of 'love/above' though.

I think you're right; I still don't quite know what I want to say in here. I know I mean something, I'm just hoping that as this evolves it'll become clear (so much for poetic certainty...). Ominous is the idea - the first stanza lets it down most, although the last stanza is meant to be a little lighter. Maybe I could get away with some blustery language, it is about storm and wind after all (yes okay, you can kill me later ;-) )

A holster of chump

What if I said 'this poem is awesome' - would that put enough of a gloss over the vote manipulation to excuse my actions?

Not too bad, am back at uni and waiting for it all to kick off again. I can't write at the moment though: I've been spending all my time listening to Hayseed Dixie and my head's so full of bluegrass it's going to explode. Not that it's a bad thing, of course, just a 'phase'.

Listen to the patronising rubbish, it'll help you improve.

I promised I'd come back and read; now I am in the 'diff and poemranker's accessible, I've read. Good poem! Definitely a nicely underused (if not downright original) idea and it's said so very directly...but without being smug, which is difficult to achieve. It reads very quickly - only two places didn't quite follow for me: 'covertly abused her job' has '-ly' and 'a-' together which interrupted my reading (changing 'abused' to simply 'used' would solve it there) and 'whereupon', which fits but is a bit long. However, I might be reading it *too* fast, in which case most other people probably wouldn't find the issues that I did. Definitely worth a nine, I'm not changing the ten though. If this got a score lower than it deserves, I'd feel guilty.

I will; I've been packing though, so I'd rather spend thirty seconds balancing out the trolling damage and wait until I have some time to properly think and comment - I'll be back in Cardiff later today, so I'll have the time then :-)

:-)

Heh

Ever heard of a dictionary?