Free verse № 80854
I Go On
I keep my feelings to myself
Emotions boxed up, on a shelf.
My face may never show pain,
though tears in my heart fall like rain.
Cool as ice , on the outside I must be
Never breaking, but solid as a tree.
Bending slightly with life's wind
Then standing straight and strong again.
I save my tears and fears for the night,
Keeping my pain and worry out of sight.
Waking in silence with the dawn.
With no word of complaint;
I go on.
23 comments
I go on.
Taking into account the previous comments about your poem, I suggest you rewrite the first two lines as follows:
Except insofar as I post poems about my feelings on a poetry website called poemranker.com, I keep my feelings to myself.
Except insofar as I splatter my emotions around the Internet willy-nilly like some sort of deranged Harris, I keep my emotions boxed up on a metaphorical internal shelf.
This rewrite will no doubt improve your credibility and your reputation for accuracy. It will, however, render the rest of the poem redundant. Accordingly, I suggest that lines 3 to 13 inclusive are scrapped altogether.
Yours &c.
Enderby Throbbington-Smythe Esq.
DEAR SIR I COMMEND MYSELF TO YOU
FOR I
A RELATIVE OF THE DECEASED MORGAN TSVANGIRAI
ENTREAT YOU TO JOIN WITH ME
IN A CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS PROPOSITION
MILLIONS OF DOLLARS CAN BE YOURS
I NEED ONLY:
YOUR BANK DETAILS
YOUR EMAIL
YOUR HOME TELEPHONE NUMBER
YOUR COMPLETE AND BREATHTAKINGLY STUPID
TRUST AND CREDULITY.
At least there is some elegance to the language. AND arbitrary linebreaks. Without which NO poem is complete.
And another thing. If you are an American logged in to this site can I point out that:
"I could care less about that"
Means that you ascribe an amount of care greater than or equal to some arbitrarily small, positive epsilon. What you mean to say is:
"I couldn't care less about that"
Which means that you care an amount less than some arbtrarily small epsilon. Meaning that for any positive amount of care, you care less. This is a rigorous definition of not caring.
Could you please all take this on board? And in more general terms, think hard about the grammatical structure of what your write before you click on the 'submit' button.
At least, only one with a capital 'G'.
Why is this? -- it's because learning more constructive responses to pain than whining is an important part of development. As true in poetry, whatever level you're at, as life.
Whining won't ever get you a positive response from fellow poetry writers, any more than whining works in life. It may garner you accolades from your fellow angst-ridden teenagers, but your better off communicating with them in a blog, not here. Here you will just be mocked. Why? again, consider life. What's the best way to quickly train a child not to whine? Mockery and derision. Perhaps cruel, but it works.
This does not mean it is forbidden to express personal pain in poetry. Au contraire. We're all gluttons for creatively expressed deep down trauma hound pain. We simply have more sophisticated tastes in our consumption of angst than the sound of a whining child. This isn't snobbery, but the built-in instinctive human reaction to whining.
What the fuck are you talking about? What, are you afraid if you edit it your head will explode?
this is also a great candidate for the split couplet form and i think it would really pick up the pace and fit your theme well
also, show us WHY you feel this way and have to keep it all bottled inside
Luckily I can laugh about it now....E
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