HAM
you can apologize
and hope
you can cut every tie
until you run out of rope
you can try
and knot them back up
but it’s shorter than it ever was
you can bottle up your tears
and swear into the night
you can curse the good lord
but it’ll never make you right
you can’t smother the flames
from the fires you light
you can run and hide
you can try to steal the stars
out of my eyes
but you lose sight
of why you started fighting
this fight
—don’t come crying
Points:
Time spent:
IP address:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
Are you sure you want to delete this comment? This cannot be undone.
Mark this comment as a review? Points will be awarded to the poster.
Your comment was posted, but it wasn’t long enough to count as a review. Reviews need about four complete sentences (at least 250 characters). Try writing another review that explains your thoughts in more detail — the author will appreciate it, and you’ll earn points for it.
142,348 Literary Works • 677,289 Reviews
Hey Sedona! Welcome to WriterFeed, and congratulations on already posting poems!
I like that the rhyme scheme is irregular; it starts with ABAB, then dips into not rhyming, then to ACBCDC, though part of me thinks the poem would feel tighter if the ABAB transitioned into CDCD, keeping every other line rhyming. It gives the poem a nice rhythm, but I also think it works to lose it at points.
My favourite part of the poem is the rope metaphor:
This idea has a real mechanism, because as you said, each cut shortens the rope, so knotting it back up makes it “shorter than it ever was.” This image you've created does the real emotional work in the poem: the severing, repair, diminishment without explaining itself. This works so well in a poem about someone who is trying to sever a relationship and who is bitter, defiant, and even a little bit self-destructive about it!
I think the poem weakens
It weakens after stanza one, since the rope metaphor disappears. It becomes a list of familiar gestures, and whilst each is plausible, it doesn't have the same specificity or tight logic of the rope. I think these images could be a lot stronger. Perhaps if every 'you can try' met a consequence in the same material, like frayed, tied, tightened, hanging, the poem would feel built rather than listed, and the final line would hit harder?
Overall, a really good poem! <3