Selfish

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

The poem's central structural choice — using "Selfish" as a recurring incantation — does real work. Each repetition shifts the word's weight, moving it from accusation to wound to reclaimed identity, and that arc is genuinely felt. The ending lands with quiet force precisely because the whole poem has been building toward the speaker's acceptance of the label on her own terms. The long catalog stanza ("to the days I spent sitting at your desk...") earns its length because the accumulation mirrors the emotional reality being described: labor that was never seen.

Two areas would benefit from revision. The bolded passage midway through the poem reads as a draft fragment rather than a finished section — it trails off with a lone "o" and incomplete syntax ("the safe haven / o"), and the bolding itself, likely a formatting artifact, disrupts the poem's visual consistency without a clear purpose. That section contains the poem's most genuinely lyrical image ("the crib of my words") but it is buried in incomplete phrasing; finishing and integrating it cleanly would strengthen rather than interrupt the poem's momentum. Second, several phrases rely on abstract language where the poem's strongest moments are concrete: "foreign constraints," "keeping afloat another self," and "overflowing anger" tell the reader what to feel rather than showing the thing itself. The poem already demonstrates it can do the latter — "my shoulders shrank," "between your clenched teeth" — so extending that specificity to the hazier passages would bring the whole piece to the same level.

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You did well with this writing. Sometimes we have to be selfish and do for ourselves. Each person is either a giver or a taker and takers will drain our essence if we let them. This is good especially with English not your first language 

for pointing out that this author is not writing in their native language. I give you a couple of pieces of advice; one is to read your work out loud. If you do that, you find the natural pauses in the conversation. Second, never feel like you have enough of a vocabulary. If you are not sure of a word, but think it is a good fit, look it up! You may find that it fits perfect, or there is another word that fits better. Really look at the meaning of a word. how is it used? Pretty good, now, write some more. I want to see what you have. ~ Geezer.

This poem is wonderful!  There is one part in the poem where, I believe, there was supposed to be a space between words, but they are pressed together..."When your overflowing angersurrounded me," it reads... A gentle edit would fix that, no problem!  Great job, and welcome to Neopoet!