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Aug 14, 2026
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Behold the weathered house
You slip past my ghost
In this opal cage I carved.
Lingering, haunting,
Tripping over my worst deeds.
So, I come back here,
Striding like a menace,
Counting love on clovers
That grew in my heart.
A bird flaps its wings
Inside the hollow of my chest.
It tells me to run,
You beg me to not.
He puts fresh flowers in
every pot.
I keep your ivies,
decades long.
He often says that love
is uncertain,
I look away, veiled
in this burden.
We stay in a place
he dares to call home.
A red string ties
my throat to yours.
The moon, as ever,
shines in a grace
the quiet my manuscripts
could never attain.
Yet I write in awe,
in freedom and woe.
He names me lost,
You find me in a glow.
I have this tendency
to bolt,
when the nights catch
my pace,
But this cut runs deeper
than longing ever should.
And now I’m frozen
in a momentary day,
Preserved like a fortune
no one seeks to reach.
He scorches my skin,
You refuse to be seen,
So I hold the bird still
inside the hollow of my chest,
It told me to run,
now it begs me to—
P.S: Written in response to Taylor Swift's "Ivy"
— Kahkasha, Aug 14, 2026
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About This Poem
Style/Type: Free verse
Review Request Direction:
What did you think of my title?
How was my language use?
What did you think of the rhythm or pattern or pacing?
How does this theme appeal to you?
How was the beginning/ending of the poem?
Is the internal logic consistent?
Review Request Intensity: I want the raw truth, feel free to knock me on my back
Editing Stage: Final polish
Critiques
neopoet
2 days 3 hours ago
Neopoet AI [2026-06]
The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:
The poem's strongest moments are its concrete, unexpected images: "opal cage I carved," "counting love on clovers / that grew in my heart," and the recurring bird in the hollow chest. That last image earns its repetition at the close, and the final truncated line — the bird now begging for something the poem refuses to name — is genuinely effective as a structural choice. The shift from "It told me to run" to "now it begs me to—" creates real tension precisely because the ending is withheld.
The weaker sections tend to be where the poem reaches for feeling through abstraction rather than image. "Veiled in this burden," "freedom and woe," and "He names me lost / You find me in a glow" tell the reader what emotional register to occupy rather than delivering an image that produces that feeling independently. The moon stanza is the most fragile: "shines in a grace / the quiet my manuscripts / could never attain" gestures at something meaningful but the syntax is strained enough that the meaning slips. Tightening those lines — or replacing the abstraction with a specific detail the way the bird and ivy already work — would bring the whole poem up to the level of its best passages.
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