Poem 'Tealights and Debris'

[Valentine]

I'm very much a lurker here, and I really don't mean to be cheeky in using this forum, but I've generally found this to be one of the best forums for impartial and constructive criticism.

I've got a poem I want peoples opinions on, not explicitly adventure game related, but the forum rules don't mention this as neccissary criteria, and I've seen similar topics in the past.

Anyway, with that said, here is my poem. Any opinion of any sort would be greatly appreciated.



TEALIGHTS AND DEBRIS

Tealights go floating on indigo sea,
I stare in the eyes of reflections of me.
Eat of the fruit of the strawberry tree,
And watch the birds fly by, fly beautifully.

Alone I dream, tranquil, alone on the quay,
Wrapped in a blanket I brought here with me,
Watching the seaweed and ocean debris.
Why did I give up the boy who loved me?

I hear distant singing. I count down from three.
Whispers and murmurs; the way it should be.
Here I am crying, with dying esprit,
Misleading my mind into thinking I'm free.

Nightmares and fables, they don't matter to me.
The moonlight shines down on the red wine and brie.
What is the reason that he has to be
In love with a boy, a boy he can't see?

Why is my lover the lone absentee
From my candlelit picnic by the deep night time sea?
He doesn't know what he wants to be.
The only dream I have, is the dream to be me.

[Andail]

It's quite good, in my opinion. It has a sad, dreamy atmosphere and some nice phrasings.
There are a few issues you migth need to address. First of all, its verse meter is inconsistent. Now, most poets nowadays don't bother with meter, but then they avoid one althogether. Your poem has a very tangible rythm in some places, but it's overall inconsistent. There is a strong presence of dactyllic tetrameter, like in the opening lines:

Tea-lights go floa-ting on in-di-go sea
(I) stare in the eyes of re-flec-tions of me

and in most other lines too, but it deviates from this rythm in too many places to offer an easy reading. Every time the reader must change their way of reading the poem, its fluency will suffer.

Also, some of the rhymes feel slightly forced, so to speak. Are you sure you need all the lines to rhyme in the same way? I understand the effect of having "me" recurring throughout the poem, but you could have at least half of the lines rhyme with something else. Otherwise, the efforts of producing innovative rhymes might seem almost comical.

Again, many of the wordings are nice, and the imagery is beautiful, but you need to uniform the meter (or drop it althogether, and write in complete free verse) and reconsider your rhymes.

Good luck!

[cobra79]

I am not a poet and I like what you did here, but I also noticed that the rhymes feel forced.

your rhyme structure at the moment is
A, A, A, A

you could try
A, B, A, B or A, B, B, A or A, A, B, B