Hello, I will be critiquing your piece on behalf of . I will do my best to help by suggesting improvements that can be made and general feedback on aesthetic appeal.

First Impressions

Concrete detail would benefit this piece a lot. I don't really know who's talking or why? Where are they speaking from? The kitchen? In a house? On the rooftop? The rain falling? Cathy Song wrote about how she felt swimming one afternoon in Hawaii. This piece she titled, "Cloud Moving Hands". But underneath the surface of a poem about swimming, what it was really about is how she coped with the death of her mother.

Good poetry needs to be like that. The world is not laid bare as a kitchen table. Things hide in the folds of our clothes, reaching out only to shrink from sunlight. If someone has stolen something from you, you form a picture in your head, seeing the roundness of it, or smoothness, or whatever-quality upholds its particular shape. It could be your heart, something cliched as that, but in your mind it can take a physical form.

Use that to your advantage. Make a metaphor. Make something real.

Final Impressions

"I greatly underestimated just how much I was affected by you leaving"

This is a very wordy sentence that could be reduced to, "I was sad because you left." It doesn't matter how you phrase it if it doesn't convey more than just information. There is language that talks about nothing in particular and there is language that appears so but in reality is working more below the surface than above it.

The key to writing a good piece is figurative language and concrete detail.

"I greatly underestimated just how much I was affected by you leaving
My fear, my nerves, my will to improve
Gone"

versus

"You leaving like a gust,
sweeping my heart
right out the front door,
I watched as it
tore through newspapers
sharper than rain, this--
this was the last thing I remember
standing outside for an hour
as I felt myself in pieces
falling on the floor, one hour.
One hour was all it took
for me to fall apart at your bedroom door."

Before, you take an almost mechanical approach to describing your feelings, listing it out as if writing a memo. The problem with that kind of writing is that it conveys little through images; depending almost entirely on denotative descriptors (e.g. "greatly underestimated", "my will to improve", "Failure doesn't scare me anymore") to convey meaning. That is something you do when describing a procedure, perhaps a surgical one, in which the patient must lie perfectly still like an anatomical model and wait (patiently) as you slowly grind their heart through a food processor and watch the driblets fall like rain. It is excruciating.

Instead, a better way is to practice imagery, figurative language, and concrete detail until you can produce something that is palpable and more emotive than a memo. Trust me. This'll work. You have something like a description of one's internal state. Now all that you have to do is imagine and apply it to a situation and use concrete detail to portray it with words and figurative language combined with imagery will do the rest.

Hope this helps somewhat.

Made perfect sense to me.

I get every word you say .. some of us have been there, deep in the thickness of Love and happiness. And when it goes wrong! it can get out of hand and turn very ugly. love to hate, happiness to insanity. Love is but A word, But your integrity is the Light that guides us all.

L
O N E
V
E

It makes sense to me, because with every relationship, we lose a piece of ourselves. Sometimes we grow or are gifted with new pieces, but we are always somewhat changed by the people we care about. Good job!

Makes sense. I can relate. Nicely done. Pulled quite firmly on those heart strings of mine.

This is kind of sad, but then it sort of has a redemption feel toward the end of it. Keep on writing, yeah!!!!