Join the Neopoet online poetry workshop and community to improve as a writer, meet fellow poets, and showcase your work. Sign up, submit your poetry, and get started.
Where oh where did the last forty nine years go?
SOS sent from my redoubt
apartment b44 – nothing much to tout
years elapsed without accomplishing much
while holed up maintaining
a reclusive mental workout.
whether yours truly
i.e. me doth attend
since I live in Schwenksville,
yours truly never did blend
into the crowded house of students,
but a poem I extend
just to keep thee in the loop,...
and who knows
maybe make a friend
who might be able,
eager and willing to lend
me their life story, cuz mine...
shot thru with loop holes
that I try to mend.
Oh my dog and golly jeepers June 2027...
alternately titled: Methacton graduating class of 1977
demarcates ruffly
née exactly fifty years since
I got hashtagged
as "the quietest kid in his class"
true to form, yours truly
did not utter a peep
being chicken 19.8.9.20
to draw the eyes and ears
of those to see
and listen respectively
to a puny senior (junior
to current senior wordsmith here),
who managed nevertheless
(dear me) to rack up majority votes
as a passive accredited student
to garner such underhanded prestige,
who graduated with dishonor able meekness,
who now vacillates whether to attend
upcoming XLIX-th reunion
at The Eagleville Taphouse
across the street from
Lower Providence Community Library,
where truth or dare be told,
(no matter the bell tolls for me),
I never befriended any classmate,
nor dated any girls -
intimidated by their ravishing beauty
towards this nirvana seeker
pronoun syllable non-verbal student
possibly afflicted with
high functioning autism
joining mamas and papas
of offspring music icons like
David Byrne of the Talking Heads
and pop singer Sia,
who comprised offshoot
of Bad Company with me
have openly discussed
how the autism spectrum
influenced their distinct
creative styles and public performances,
which engendered heart felt kinship
unbeknownst to them
regarding yours truly
one Limp Bizkit, Foo Fighting Beastie Boy,
who shied away from the madding crowd
analogous to a skittish animal
bolting at his own dark shadow,
especially when the edge of night
cast an eerie image
bitta bing bitta bang ie est en
exaggerated frightful magnification
courtesy the outer limits
of the twilight zone
try as he might
no ways and/or means
existed to detach himself
from his own monstrous silhouette
and as he relives
those academically, emotionally
and socially torturous days of yore
fractured cubist anomalous
days of his life as the world turned
remembrance of things past
tortured psyche where sole asylum
acquired tranquility within the four walls
of boyhood bedroom home of mine
at 324 level road,
which ramshackle mansion
long since razed to the ground
even though I roof fused
to drive past Stella's Way -
formerly our repurposed driveway
before papa of mine passed away,
he spent about a dozen
dirty deeds done dirt cheap
years of his existence
at Normandy Farms
independent living facility
while McMansions sprouted up
(like mushrooms after a healthy rain)
in place of approximately
a half dozen acres of wood land,
where doe a deer...
frolicked joie de vivre
ala gamely like
there was no tomorrow
in tandem with other fauna
while yours truly
struck up the tune
turkey and the straw
fiddling around on his makeshift
all purpose instrument
while traipsing along
overgrown once maintained
formal edenic gardens
that still held faint traces
of manicured floral pathways
just a tad more than
one hundred years after
Francis Scott Key
penned the immortal
words land of the free
and home of the brave,
which concluded near sacrosanct
music that induced small hairs
along the spine to tingle
where pièce de résistance
vis a vis I imagined to hear
"The Star-Spangled Banner,"
while alone within
my spiritual wilderness
imaging the United States national anthem
heard amidst the din
of 1814 after the bombardment
of Fort McHenry, said famous phrase
celebrates the country's independence,
resilience, and the bravery
required to defend foundational liberties,
now subjected to hemorrhaging
linkedin to Project 2026
where the figurative
clock turned back
prior to the then revolutionary ENIAC
(Electronic Numerical
Integrator and Computer)
completed in 1945
at the University of Pennsylvania,
said bulky innovation
revolutionized technology
by executing thousands
of calculations per second—
making enormous stride-rite steps
cue shoe man where defeat
stood stock still as music accompanied
the ears of Allied powers
clinched against axis and coordinated
toe tilly tellingly tallied
battle weary troops covering
over 1,000 times faster,
where ground control to major tom
facilitated missiles to be lobbed
against the Axis powers
more accurately than any
calculating machine before
during World War II
primarily purposed to calculate
complex artillery firing tables,
though later used
for weather forecasting
and atomic energy research
turning the red tide of war
into bloody season of the witch
courtesy brilliant bombardiers
against bellicose belligerents.
About This Poem
Style/Type: Structured: Western
Review Request Direction:
What did you think of my title?
How was my language use?
What did you think of the rhythm or pattern or pacing?
How does this theme appeal to you?
How was the beginning/ending of the poem?
Is the internal logic consistent?
Review Request Intensity: I want the raw truth, feel free to knock me on my back
Editing Stage: Editing - polished draft
Critiques
neopoet
3 hours 55 min ago
Neopoet AI [2026-06]
The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:
The poem operates as a kind of sustained associative monologue, and that impulse — to let one thought drag the next into view — is not without precedent or value. The problem is that the associative chain here is so loose that the poem never accumulates pressure. It sprawls rather than expands. By the time the reader arrives at ENIAC and World War II artillery tables, the reunion in Eagleville feels like something from a different lifetime, and not in the productive, thematically resonant way the poem seems to intend.
The central emotional situation is genuinely compelling: a socially isolated person, possibly on the autism spectrum, weighing whether to attend a fifty-year high school reunion, haunted by a boyhood home that no longer exists. That is rich material. The poem touches it in places — the demolished house on Level Road, the formal gardens going to seed, the voted-quietest-kid anecdote — but it keeps fleeing from its own subject matter into lists and name-drops that do the work of avoidance rather than excavation.
The coded cipher embedded in the poem (19.8.9.20 for the word "shit," presumably) reads as a gimmick rather than a meaningful formal choice. If the poem is about someone who could not speak, encoding the one transgressive word does carry a kind of logic, but the device needs to be earned and explained by context, not dropped in as a puzzle.
The celebrity references — David Byrne, Sia, Limp Bizkit, Foo Fighters, Beastie Boys — accumulate without doing work. Namedropping artists who have discussed autism is not the same as exploring how autism shaped this speaker's experience. The poem tells the reader about a kinship rather than enacting it.
Lineation throughout is arbitrary. The line breaks do not create
Please send feedback about Neo (our AI critique system) to our contact form.