I have a suggestion and would you please do me the favor of taking it halfway seriously? The suggestion is this: write a poem in which something happens. It doesn't have to be something very big or important, just anything - some action from beginning to end. I'm not asking you to change your whole personal whatever, only to take a crack at it once and see how it feels. Yeah, thanks. -zodiac

I have a suggestion and would you please do me the totally undeserved favor of considering it halfway seriously? The suggestion is this: write a poem in which something happens. It doesn't have to be something very big or important, just anything - some action from beginning to end. A story, like. I'm not asking you to change your whole personal whatever it is people think is their whole personal thing here, only to take a crack at it once and see how it feels. Yeah, okay, thanks. -zodiac

I have an wacky way-out idea and would you please do me the honor of considering it even a quarter-way seriously, though I'm a complete stranger to you and have done nothing to merit such consideration? The idea is this: write a poem in which something happens. It doesn't have to be something very big or important, just anything - some action from beginning to end. Kind of a narrative, you could say. I'm not asking you to change your whole personal whatever, only to take a crack at it once and see how it feels. What's the worst thing that could happen? You could produce an awful, exactly-identical-to-everyone-else's poem, drawing the stinging ridicule of everybody on this site? Um. Yeah, thanks. -zodiac

I have a suggestion and would you please do me the favor of taking it halfway seriously? The suggestion is this: write a poem in which something happens. It shouldn't be something very big (i.e., death) or important (ibid.), just anything - some action from beginning to end. I'm not asking you to change your whole whatever, just take a crack at it and see if it feels better than being endlessly mocked for posting these same silly angst poems. What've you got to lose, really?

Please, I'm being utterly serious right now, having just watched a very touching movie in which something very moving happened to a lonely man who didn't do - something I can't remember, or maybe didn't catch in the first place, since I was bawling childlike tears from the first scene on.

Wait, that didn't come out right. I mean to say that I'm not such a monster as the people on this site would have you believe. I DO believe in constructive criticism, and this is it. If you want to improve your writing, you'll try my idea. Consider it an experiment - like broadening your horizons, or a homework assignment from a kindly science teacher whom you've secretly had a crush on all year. Thanks so much for reading this far. I look forward to seeing what you can do. -zodiac

Practically every single line of this is wrong.

Not surprising, considering your source.

Ace. I've seen it. "No one escaped" bugged me because people obviously did, or were released, at least, though rarely. I imagine you mean in the figurative sense, or in the sense of the country as a prison. Still, I'd feel better without that bit.

As far as I know, the worst of the (now-abandoned) prisons are still sealed off. Isn't that the case?

Have you ever read this poem out loud?

One of your best in a while.

"Wheel chair knight of no table" needs work. I get it now, and would've had an easier time if you'd made wheelchair one word. Maybe hyphenate "knight-of-no-table" as well. Maybe not.

If you experienced some massive head wound, causing your capacity for thought to become moderately impaired, do you suppose you would believe MORE in God, or LESS? Thanks -

Curious in Schenectady, NY

"Eyes cold as aircraft carriers
Like they were a fighter jet" doesn't add anything to the image for me; and I don't know why you went from plural (eyes, carriers) to singular (jet) like that.

I don't see anything wrong with using the first line for a title.

I would drop "as skin" from the second line, the second "like the heart" and the second "to be". They look okay on paper, but I find when I read them aloud I sound like a giant posturing clown.

days should be day's. You knew that, I'm sure. Drop the semicolon after breath. Change everything after headboard. Up to that point, I thought it was pretty good.

You shouldn't ever use "thee" or "thou" in a poem.

Contrary to a widespread misconception, those terms aren't used in great classic poetry because they're particularly poetic, but because they were actually common expressions at the time of the poems' composition, like the formal and informal "you" used by present-day Spanish speakers.

Anyway, writing "thee" and "thou" now just looks like you have no idea about real or recent poetry, which is always always ALWAYS written in modern English nwadays. This isn't because an oppressive poetry-dominating INSTITUTION is trying to make everybody's poetry bland and homogenous - which it isn't - so that rebelling against it is something noble and individual, like William Blake, but rather - well, because it simply looks silly to every single person on the planet.

Sorry to take up so much space on your poem with my overblown comment when I don't even know if you're that passionate about it or not. But in the past dozens of people have had huge hissy fits and called me all sorts of evil names for making this same suggestion. Go figure.

Sweet and quietly stellar.

The most stellar ode about finding out a girl's gay and yelling "you bitch" on poemranker, minus 2.

Not as stellar as the other ones, I'm afraid.

Hi, welcome to poemranker, and stellar poem! I've developed a really ultra-stellar tool to help budding poets in their writing, and posted it at this URL: http://tinyurl.com/ywr5z. Good luck and keep up the stellar work!

No. But one should not ramble. Stellar use of exclamation marks, though. As always.

What were the other costumes? Was yours the best? Were you crying when you called horus?

You could say this poem is about a woman (re)claiming and refashioning the 'belle dame' stereotype historically used to denigrate and oppress her, making it instead symbolic of archetypal feminine power (i.e., the 'Lilith' who uses whatever tools are available to her, including her much-villified sexuality, to subvert men's [physical and cultural] dominance,) in much the same way as Pat Benetar's "Love Is a Battlefield" video did in the eighties. But I bet you weren't thinking about all that, especially since third-wave feminism is mostly a joke played on women by [still-sadly-dominant] men.

Also, "smokey" should be "smoky",

"judgement" should be "judgment",

"syrines" would be better "sirens",

"facaude" should be "façade" (I think),

"She" in "She grows desperately" should be lower-case,

you're missing some punctuation after "fire", which is not very effective for me as a closing line, anyway,

and you might consider not ending every line at the end of a sentence or clause (i.e., at a comma or period) as this is widely considered bad form.

Otherwise, not bad. Better than your other one, anyway.