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.

K

Snooze Button

BUZZ... BUZZ... BUZZ

The alarm is going off.
That mind-numbing noise
cuts through my bliss.

Smack the clock and roll back over.
 

I try to remember where I was.
The touch of your hand in mine.
The feel of your arm around me.
The sound of your voice
telling me good morning.
 

Oh no! It's fading, getting farther away.
BUZZ... BUZZ... BUZZ
I don't want to open my eyes.
That means accepting a new day
without you in it.
"Five more minutes, mom. Please?"
 

BUZZ... BUZZ... BUZZ
I take a deep breath in,
building the courage to take a peek.
It looks the same, but it's not.
You're not standing over me
with your hands on your hips.
 

I guess it's time.
I really don't want to do it.
BUZZ... BUZZ... BUZZ
Ok, acceptance can't wait.
I'm not ready to face this world.

 

Flipping back the covers 

to emerge from my cocoon.

Buzzing through my day

until I can find you again.

— KJax, Aug 12, 2026

About This Poem

Style/Type: Free verse

Editing Stage: Polished draft

About the Author

Region, Country: Pennsylvania, USA

This user supports Neopoet so it can be free to all

More from this author

Critiques

neopoet

neopoet

4 days 15 hours ago

Neopoet AI (premium) [2026-06]

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

The structural choice at the heart of this poem is its strongest asset: the reader arrives at the loss gradually, first assuming the dream is romantic before the line "Five more minutes, mom. Please?" reframes everything. That single line does a great deal of work, quietly reassigning the earlier tender images to a mother rather than a lover, and it rewards the reader who registers the shift. Placing that revelation late in the poem is an effective decision.

The recurring "BUZZ... BUZZ... BUZZ" is doing real structural labor too. It marks time, interrupts the speaker's retreat into memory, and mirrors how grief gets punctured by the ordinary demands of a waking day. Its repetition builds a rhythm that the poem can lean on, and its final appearance just before "Acceptance can't wait" lands with some earned weight.

The dream imagery in the third stanza is where the poem's specificity could deepen. "The touch of your hand in mine" and "the feel of your arm around me" are gentle but general; they could belong to almost any relationship. Because these lines carry the emotional memory of the mother, a more particular detail here would make the loss feel like this loss rather than a loss in the abstract. The one concrete image that does arrive later, the mother "standing over me with your hands on your hips," is far more alive precisely because it is specific and a little wry. More of that texture earlier would strengthen the whole.

The closing stanza leans on some phrasing that arrives ready-made. "Blanket cocoon," and the capitalized "Acceptance" in particular, name the emotion rather than enact it, and the final line "Ready or not world, here I come" shifts into a brightness the preceding stanzas have not quite prepared. Consider whether the poem wants that resolved a tone, or whether ending on something closer to the reluctance already established would ring truer. The strongest earlier moments trust the image to carry the feeling; the ending might do the same rather than announcing the stage of grief by name.

One small technical note: the stray non-breaking spaces and the doubled space in the last line ("world, here I come") suggest formatting that could be cleaned up so the eye moves through the poem without interruption.

Please send feedback about Neo (our AI critique system) to our contact form.

Join Neopoet to leave a critique

Neopoet is a free community of poets who critique and support each other's writing.