Retrospect

The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:

The piece carries genuine emotional weight, and the extended metaphor of the spear — "spear tipped words slid as effortlessly through my ribs as they did my ears" — is the strongest moment in the poem. It is visceral and earned, and the doubling back of that image in the sixth stanza ("the strength to thrust that spear") gives the poem a structural coherence it otherwise struggles to sustain. The confession in the third stanza, about the poem posted online, is also quietly powerful: it risks something specific and arrives at a real psychological truth rather than a performed one.

The main area for development is the poem's relationship to abstraction. Several stanzas, particularly the fourth and eighth, tell the reader what to feel rather than rendering experience in image or action. Phrases like "the duality of wanting you to be happy and wanting you to suffer" and the catalogue of self-definitions — "a drifter, a pirate, a criminal" — state conclusions without earning them through the poem's own language, so they land as assertion rather than discovery. The final stanza gestures toward something beautiful with "no more than the life of a candle the duration of a dream," but the syntactic compression there feels accidental rather than crafted; a small punctuation adjustment or line break would let that image breathe and do the work the stanza needs. The suggestion would be to return to the stanzas that feel most abstract and ask what moment, image, or sensory detail underlies each claim — the spear stanza proves the poem can do this, and doing it consistently throughout would make the whole piece as strong as its best parts.

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Welcome to Neopoet!

Thank you for posting your first poem with us! 

This is dripping with honest and raw reflection! And i applaud the honesty with yourself. There is so much within these words, that i must come back and visit again to be able to offer critique. 

Please reach out if you have any questions or need help navigating through Neopoet. You can usually find me in the chatroom. We just launched our themed chatrooms, Geezer is hosting a room on Saturday nights, Myself on Friday nights and BlueSkies on Monday nights. You can find them on the calendar events. Hope you can visit!! We would love to have you join us!!

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(and don't forget to Write!!)

Yours in Ink,

Tink

(Bangs the table, stands up, and claps.)

Now this is the level at which one can say, emotions are spoken into the reader's mind.

I particularly like how it guides the reader through someone killing the narrator with a spear, and tell of a journey that freed the dead and the living alike.

From what I can understand, this poem speaks of the narrator's journey from an anti-social element, to himself, or rather, his new self, relieving his old anti-social self.

The poem just rings in the head, and burns in the soul.

This, is the level which one terms as, telling is showing.

The poem slowly guides the readers through a series of declarations, meanwhile, making the reader feel what the narrator has had.

And further, it shows a mental journey, a journey that is not declared, but felt.

Implications come through the declarations, and the telling, becomes a kind of image.

And that is simply beautiful to me.

Now, for one last note.

I really do think, the poem needs better breaks, because it kind of reads like prose.

You see, I know prose poems exist, but this one is way too much into prose.(personal opinion)

The poem reads like an unsent letter, a literal unsent letter, or something like an esoteric self-reflection.

But as I see, one doesn't call a text a poem unless it has a certain kind of structure.

Here, as I see, there is not much emphasis, there could easily be 7 to 8 times more lines with simple line breaking.

The line breaks would make the reader slow down at moments, and the poem can return to being long lines during intense action, so basically, high and low.

Right now, it has high and low, but not the high and low of poems, but high and low of prose.

So, I would conclude that, this piece, is beautiful. Just a bit of line breaks can make it a text that resonates with the literary path itself.

only echo the praise that the others have heaped upon your head, and the criticism that they have shared. The line breaks could have been better, but in general, the whole thing works. I do agree that it reads more like prose than poetry, but I will leave that to the discretion of the reader. I can tell from the spacing of the lines, that you have done this work on the site, rather than on your notepad or notebook; use your notepad or book to write your work and then transfer it to the site. that way you have a record of your work other than the site. Backup is important. ~ Geezer.