I miss

The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:

The poem moves through a recognizable and painful arc, and its central tension—between an "old me" and a "new me," each defined against the other—gives the piece a clear spine to follow. The repetition of "I miss the old me" works to anchor that structure, and when the second iteration extends the phrase ("the faithless / The one who didn't know God / so she couldn't feel worthless"), the repetition earns its keep by adding new information rather than simply restating.

The most distinctive turn is the link drawn between faith and self-worth, where knowing God becomes the condition for feeling worthless rather than relieved of worthlessness. That inversion is the poem's sharpest idea, and it lands because it is unexpected. It would be worth trusting that idea to carry more of the poem's weight, since the later lines lean harder on declared emotion than on this kind of earned reversal.

The imagery of the cuts in the opening stanza is concrete and physical, which grounds the speaker's distress in the body. By contrast, lines like "Just BLEED!" and "Go ahead and bury me!" reach for intensity through volume and capitalization rather than through image, and they risk telling the reader what to feel instead of showing it. The grave metaphor that closes the poem is more developed, and the choice to break "rise / from / this / grave / you / nailed / shut" into single-word lines does enact the slow, halting effort of rising. One consideration: the final spaced-out "L O V E!!" with its exclamation points pushes toward a sarcasm that the rest of the closing image handles more subtly on its own. The nailing-shut "out of love" already carries the bitter irony; the typographic emphasis may be doing work the line has already done.

One concrete suggestion: the poem shifts from the third-person "she" of the new me to a direct address to "you" partway through, and that pivot is where some clarity is lost. Establishing earlier who "you" is, or whether the "new me" and the "you" are the same figure, would let the closing accusation hit a defined target rather than a diffuse one.

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