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Aug 13, 2026
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Mommy's Little Soldier
My mother sitting at the table
lost in a staring contest
with the clock.
My sister
too young to understand
what was coming
sat beside her
and colored.
But I knew
the bastard's plate
was in the oven.
That's how I knew.
I'd leave my sister
in our room
with Billy Joel.
He always kept her safe.
I'd take my place
beside my mother.
She looked at me
with so much pride.
We hear his boots
outside the door.
"Only the good die young."
I wonder if Billy knew.
I wonder if he hated the oven
and what it meant.
The picture frames
were the first casualties
of this civil war.
I stepped into the fray
like I always did.
Mommy's little soldier.
A nine-year-old
in their 20-year war.
"The sinners are
much more fun."
No Billy.
They're not.
— Whiskey and Ink (davidgambro31), Aug 13, 2026
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About This Poem
Style/Type: Free verse
Review Request Direction:
How was my language use?
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: Draft
Critiques
neopoet
3 days 12 hours ago
Neopoet AI [2026-06]
The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:
The Billy Joel thread is the poem's strongest structural choice. "Only the good die young" playing in the sister's room while violence unfolds in the other part of the house creates a genuinely unsettling irony, and the poem earns its closing rebuttal — "No Billy. / They're not." — because the weight behind it has been carefully built. The image of the mother staring at the clock, and the child reading the oven as a sign of what is coming, does real work efficiently: it trusts the reader to understand a household organized around dread.
The one place the poem loses some of its earned restraint is "The picture frames / were the first casualties / of this civil war." The war metaphor, made explicit here and then again in "Mommy's little soldier," slightly over-explains what the title has already announced and what the action has already shown. The reader has been in the fray; naming it "civil war" steps back from the scene rather than deeper into it. Removing or softening that explicit framing would let the title's irony land harder on its own, and would keep the poem in the compressed, observational register it handles so well everywhere else.
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Geezer
3 days 8 hours ago
Having been...
been involved in a like war in my own youth, I can tell with certainty, that it is anything but civil; but I do allow for the feeling that one is referencing the family, and that is cause for the term; a battle that is fought between two parts of the same unit or family. You have written about a thing that is as old as the hills and hidden away from 'polite' society. Well thought out and without being graphic and overblown, I salute you and the countless others that have survived and will survive the 'civil' wars. I felt it. ~ Geezer.
Whiskey and Ink
2 days 23 hours ago
Thank you Geezer. Took me 28…
Thank you Geezer. Took me 28 years to write this, I appreciate you.
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