Yesterday, 04:31 PM
The opening stanza in your piece seems to me to set up an expectation of a consistent rhyme scheme, so it’s disappointing when that’s immediately and unnecessarily abandoned.
For instance, here’s an example of how a second stanza could continue the pattern:
Handsome boys before me,
ones she said she loved, she bought.
She told them what she tells me,
her words deception-gloved and wrought.
And perhaps a third stanza:
She lied and lies and lies again,
says I’m different, sweet, not plain.
She butters me up, she batters me down,
but I shall knock off her dismal crown.
If you begin with a tight, musical rhyme and then abandon it, readers will feel a kind of aesthetic short-change — as though they’d paid for a pattern that never arrives.
For instance, here’s an example of how a second stanza could continue the pattern:
Handsome boys before me,
ones she said she loved, she bought.
She told them what she tells me,
her words deception-gloved and wrought.
And perhaps a third stanza:
She lied and lies and lies again,
says I’m different, sweet, not plain.
She butters me up, she batters me down,
but I shall knock off her dismal crown.
If you begin with a tight, musical rhyme and then abandon it, readers will feel a kind of aesthetic short-change — as though they’d paid for a pattern that never arrives.