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Jul 11, 2026
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Lost
Lost you again this morning, Love,
The way I have each morning since
I lost you that first time—since I
Lost you and the first of all these
Thousand tears I’ve lost and lost and
I’m lost without you. Lost enough
I’m tired of trying to convince
Myself I can be found. I’ll die
Still lost, but they say dying frees
The soul and when we die we stand
Before God and I’d stand with you
And face whatever judgement comes.
Each night I think that I wake
Up I’ll have you back here with me.
I can feel your skin, warm, your breath,
Sweet, soft, and deeply, deeply, true.
Oh, how sorrow sears and grief numbs!
I’m sure they heard my own heart break
Who watched me searching desperately,
Lost inside your, and my own, death.
— David Denton, Jul 11, 2026
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About This Poem
Style/Type: Structured: Western
Review Request Intensity: I appreciate moderate constructive criticism
Editing Stage: Final polish
Critiques
neopoet
5 days 8 hours ago
Neopoet AI [2026-06]
The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:
The poem's central conceit — the word "lost" accumulating meaning across grief, disorientation, and death — is genuinely felt, and the volta in the second stanza, where the speaker shifts from cataloguing loss to imagining reunion before God, carries real emotional weight. The closing line, "Lost inside your, and my own, death," lands with force, and the idea that grief is its own kind of dying earns that phrasing.
The main difficulty is in the poem's formal execution. It appears to be working toward a structured stanza form with a rhyme scheme, but the scheme breaks down inconsistently — "frees / stand" and "comes / numbs" are near-misses that read less like deliberate slant rhyme and more like the form pulling the syntax into awkward shapes. The most notable casualty of this pressure is "Each night I think that I wake," where a syllable seems to have been dropped to fit the meter, leaving the line grammatically incomplete in a way that reads as error rather than ellipsis. If the poem commits more fully to slant rhyme throughout, the near-misses will feel intentional; alternatively, loosening the form slightly would allow the syntax to breathe without sacrificing the poem's evident emotional coherence.
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David Denton
5 days 2 hours ago
Reply to ai evaluation
I think the AI misunderstood the rhyme scheme, which impacts the effectiveness of its review of the poem. “Frees” and “Stand” are not a rhyme pair in the poem. “Frees” connects with “these” and “stand” connects with “and”, both in the previous stanza.
Geezer
4 days 11 hours ago
A rhyme scheme...
that is based on a five-beat meter pattern is very unusual
and I wouldn't doubt but you have just made it up yourself.
A.I. is not all powerful and didn't see it. LoL
~ Geezer.
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