Love

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

The poem moves through a recognizable emotional arc: it opens with broad declarations about love, narrows toward the speaker's own unmet longing, and closes on the bare admission "I need love." That movement from the general to the intimate gives the piece a shape worth building on, and the final short line lands with a directness that the more abstract opening lines do not.

The strongest moment is the turn at "I get no love or passion here / From the one I hold dear." Here the poem stops describing love in the abstract and locates it in a specific relationship and a specific disappointment. The contrast between craving and receiving nothing is the emotional center, and it arrives with welcome concreteness after the opening generalities.

Where the poem could deepen is in those opening lines. Phrases like "Love is simple," "Love is blind," and "I crave passion" rely on familiar expressions that have been used so often they no longer carry much weight. The poem already shows it can do better in the "from the one I hold dear" passage. One actionable approach would be to replace some of the stated abstractions with images drawn from the actual relationship the poem gestures toward: what a hug withheld looks like, what the silence in a room feels like, what the speaker notices when love is not returned. Concrete detail would let the reader feel the longing rather than be told of it.

The line "For what I know I know what's right" is currently hard to follow, and its meaning gets lost between the lines around it. Clarifying what conviction the speaker is asserting here, or cutting the line, would tighten the middle of the poem.

A note on the closing: "But the way I love is not observed / I need love" introduces a compelling idea, that the speaker's particular way of loving goes unseen. That notion is more interesting than the more general statements earlier and might serve the poem well if it were developed rather than stated once at the end.

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I like that this poem took the reader through the ideal of love, and connected to what a person feels when the one they want to love them doesn't. Good emotional tug on the strings. The frustration...The hope...the reality.

Good job. I hope to read more of your work and to see you join us in chat one night.

Live, Love & Laugh 

(and don't forget to Write!)

Yours in Ink,

Tink

You have a nice innate sense of rhythm. Your line lengths show that.

I'd like to pass along some advice about rhyme I've heard many times from Rattle Poetry editor Tim Green. Tim said not to use the easy rhyme, the first or second or even third rhyming word we think of. When we do, it's almost obvious that that is what we've done. In your piece, I'd point to fight/right.

Tim suggests using slant rhymes, and even then not the first or second we can find, but to dig deeper. The reason is we tend to write our lines towards the rhyme, or based off the next rhyme word - if we use a slant rhyme that is unique and different, we often surprise ourselves with where the line ends up going, usually to a place we hadn't thought of that is vastly more interesting than our first thoughts.

A fine poet and teacher Larry Levis once wrote that when he stopped thinking about meaning and thought only "to connect" did his poem take off.

Any time we think we know our goal of where the poem will go, we shouldn't write that poem. It's already dead. The beauty and fascination of poetry if finding out in the writing something we didn't know that we knew.

Hope this is received as it is meant, a positive message to help a fellow poet.