Send it in, says your friend,
Who has no idea what she's talking about.
You can barely stand this topic,
You wrote it to calm your mind.
You get the poem back, it is nothing but marks,
Amazing, great, wonderful,
There is much to like, to admire.
However, you should change
The title, the beginning image,
The adjectives, verbs, metaphors, mood.
Take out the personality,
Make it theirs, not yours.
The worst is, there is no chosen path.
Switch this, no that's the best part.
Your strongest image to one person,
Turns into a major cliché to another.
Poetic writing, what’s that?
Lyrical, rhythmic, something you should know.
You once wrote for fun, to let out that fizz of expression.
Now you need to look at the aesthetics.
How can you aestheticize your feelings of your mom’s illness?
How can you make the cancer, the heartbreak into
something visually appealing?
There is so much feeling you have.
You start to be pissed at that friend
Who begged you to turn it in,
Just because they were afraid to do anything risky on their own.
They could not reveal their soul without your nerve,
your daring to do it first.
But your feelings are not clear.
You are still in this pain.
How can you gather a respectful distance to actually write this piece,
When this pain, this feeling is still here?
Not a week ago you saw her,
A long strand of brown hair, sticking out of the back
of her bright pink hat.
Even now she is keeping whatever hairs she can.
Holding onto her hair like that will keep everything else fine,
Like the illness is more over the hair.
It pisses you off, why does she have to lose something she loves so much?
How can you clarify these emotions into anything
tangible for another person to read
To understand,
To find visually pleasing?
And why do you share this feeling?
It is yours and you don't feel ready yet to give it out,
And you shouldn't have to.
No one should.