ho_hum19 Apr 2005

Damien, you say on your homepage:

"Think what you want but express what you like not what is wrong."

Which makes me think that you only want positive comments on your poems. Now, if you really wanted to improve you would welcome all constructive criticism, but you don't. This makes me think that you are a little too insecure to receive constructive criticism as it is meant. Now if you put you poems on a website called "poemRANKER", then you can't really get all upset if someone scores you a zero; that's just their perception of your work. There's no point expecting people to build up your self image, when the image they will create (of an excellent poet) is inaccurate. You say "All I need now is an honest opinion of this
If I can write this simply do I have a gift?", you've been given an honest answer, and you've got all upset about it. It may suprise you, but if you do write something brilliant, it will generally get comments saying it is brilliant.

And finally, the grammer issue. You must accept that it is important, consider the following two sentences:

A woman, without her man, is nothing.
A woman; without her, man is nothing.

Identical words, almost directly contradictory meanings, all achieved by the placement of punctuation. So your claim that:

"if everybody decided to do this we would still understand each other."

may not be as correct as you think. Even the addition of a few commas to your poems would help a great deal, think of it as helping hands guiding the reader through your work.

Now don't get all offensive.