On Break (Edited)

[tomoffing]

Mopkins, tomoffing, thanks for your input! The theme is poverty, being too poor to buy any lunch but working with food all day. It's a complete lack of enthusiasm for life after getting stuck in a rut, and never having a social life or doing anything but working and sleeping, because of abject poverty. The only hope and joy left is the glimmer of dreams for the future, where the grass is greener.

The free-verse is intentional, I wanted this piece to lack even meter to enforce the idea of someone who is too depressed to care. I can see how the shift from focusing on real life only when necessary and spending most time in daydreams and idle hope can be confusing.

Your theme comes across no problem, you've nailed that.

However, in this piece you have used rhymes throughout. Some work, some do not.
Rhyme is as much dependent on meter as it is on the words chosen.
It's pointless of me to rhyme to you, if when you arrive there your face is blue from all of the air that you've have to go through!!

What I mean is, if you wish to keep the rhyme, you need to bring some kind of metrical structure to this. Otherwise, remove the rhymes that don't work.


On a separate note, I have heard it said before that "I didn't use meter to reinforce the chaos" (or something to that effect). I think that's an escape route from the challenge of writing a consistent meter to be honest. It doesn't reinforce a sense of chaos or confusion, it makes it chaotic and confusing to read. They are very different.

A truly skillful poet might convey those feelings by writing in a consistent meter that draws me in and along and right at the moment I should sense the confusion, they deliberately depart from meter.

Anyway, my opinion only.

Thanks again, t