Unwanted Company

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

The poem's subject matter — the internal experience of anxiety or depression personified as pursuing demons — carries genuine emotional weight, and the decision to eventually name the demons "Desmond and Rebecca" is one of the most striking choices in the piece. That naming humanizes the threat in an unexpected way and briefly lifts the language out of the abstract. The closing movement toward defiance also gives the poem a sense of arc.

The most pressing craft issue is the heavy reliance on end-rhyme, particularly the extended chain of "-ears" words in the opening (ears, fears, tears, gears, years, peers). When so many successive lines share the same sound, the rhyme begins to feel like a constraint driving the word choices rather than a device serving the meaning. A line like "I'm trying to switch gears" lands as filler — something chosen to complete the rhyme rather than to deepen the poem's feeling. A useful revision strategy would be to identify every line that exists mainly to supply a rhyme and ask whether the image or idea it carries could be replaced by something that earns its place on its own terms, even if that means loosening the rhyme scheme. The poem would also benefit from greater specificity throughout: phrases like "darkness emerged," "unwanted company," and "seeping doubt" name the experience without rendering it sensorially. The Desmond and Rebecca moment shows the poem can do this — more moments of that concreteness would make the whole piece more vivid and the emotional resolution more earned.

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Has given you excellent advice. Trim it up a little. -Geezer