The Soul Stealer.

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

This poem commits fully to a gothic-erotic mode, and there is a clear narrative arc across the five stanzas: the demon's watching, the old man's sleep-driven touch, the demon's leap, and the mortal aftermath. That final stanza is the strongest part of the piece. The reversal — the old man dead with eyes fixed open, the demon returned to the pedestal licking his fingers — lands with a genuinely eerie precision, and withholding explanation there works in the poem's favor. The image of the demon "crouched low on his pedestal high" in the opening line also sets up a useful spatial tension, low posture on a high perch, that the leap in stanza four pays off.

The poem's chief craft issue is its reliance on stacked adjectives that tell rather than show. The first stanza's "so wicked, so evil, so sly" names three near-synonyms in a row, and "lascivious," "drooling," and "hot passions" elsewhere do similar work, instructing the reader how to feel about the demon rather than letting the demon's actions carry that weight. The last stanza demonstrates the alternative: the licked fingers convey depravity without a single evaluative adjective. Trusting concrete gesture more, and cutting the labels, would sharpen the whole.

The meter is mostly anapestic and generally steady, which suits the incantatory subject. Two lines break the pattern audibly. In stanza four, "Leapt down from the pedestal black talons outstretched" runs long and loses the rhyme with "lips" that the couplet form has led the ear to expect; reworking that line to restore both the beat and the rhyme would keep the poem's momentum at its climactic moment. Similarly, the final line's "his fingers he licked" rhymes with "fixed" only approximately, and given how much the ending depends on that image, an exact rhyme there would let the close ring rather than blur.

One consideration of substance rather than technique: the poem depicts sexual contact with a sleeping, unconsenting figure, and the current handling frames that contact largely through the demon's and old man's pleasure, with the sighing and knee-lifting presented as the woman being moved to "please." If the intent is horror, the poem would be served by locating more of its dread in her position rather than in the two figures acting upon her, so that the reader's unease is directed where the horror actually lies. As written, the middle stanzas risk reading as indulgence rather than critique. Clarifying that stance would give the strong final image a firmer foundation to rest on.

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I loved the title, which caught my eye completely.  I couldn't stop reading it, and then when the poem ended it was overwhelming.  Thank you for sharing.