The boy with the makeshift yearbook

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

The poem's strongest moment is the heart monitor simile — the name becoming a reading on a heart monitor captures the spike of panic and then flatline quality of the interaction with the popular girl in a way that feels genuinely fresh. The detail of the pen threaded through the bun is similarly precise and earned: it does real work in characterizing the object of longing without sentimentalizing. These small physical observations are where the poem is most alive.

The closing line, "the funeral sound of everything we should have been," pulls against that strength. After a poem that has been disciplined enough to show longing through sneakers catching on gravel and perfect O's, the final line names the emotion directly and at some volume, which slightly undercuts the restraint that came before it. The bell has enough weight already — the funeral metaphor may not need to be stated so explicitly. It might be worth sitting with whether the image of the bell alone, or one more concrete sensory detail, could carry that ending without the poem telling the reader what to feel. The same note applies to "the reds and whites blur again," which gestures at significance without quite grounding it in the scene the way the gravel or the cursive does.

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