(09-26-2020, 01:48 PM)kllymcg430 Wrote: For those wary glances Would "[F]rom" work better here than "For?"
And shadowed sighs
Fever built up the space between us perhaps "in" after "up" here
As our hairs quarreled from side to side arresting use of "quarreled" here
Electricity, it moved from your breath to mine is "it" needed here?
As your heat tingled me in depths so sweet
I grabbed what is you, perhaps a grander word than "grabbed?"
your limbs opened for what is me
And I looked to you with excited grin
For all that is wrong seemed right, perhaps an em-dash here for a significant pause
and all that is right bored us a nice line (well, at least one got bored - in a manner of speaking)
And when you were filled to the brim
I saw your ecstasy glowed from within
Your face in my neck,
Bedroom-eyed and flushed
I let you lay a little longer strictly speaking, the grammatically correct word is "lie," despite its unfortunate aternate meaning of telling a fib
For that feeling is more than feeling nice explanation of the title
Only when I’m with you converts it from soft-core to love poem... very nice!
A somewhat difficult poem to critique due to the highly personal nature of the subject matter, but let's have a go.
The overall project here (as I read it) is to differentiate between sensuality and affection. In that project it succeeds, though readers may be turned off by the lubricious/suggestive passages before they reach the payoff at the very end. Does that make it a failure, though? No; it just selects its audience.
Global suggestions: beginning each line with a capital letter regardless of sentence structure is considered archaic by many on this board. I'm not one of them, but in this case I believe it does detract, making the reader look for sentence structure that isn't there or stress the first word of a line when that disrupts the flow. Suggest you try it capitalizing only "I" and the first word of each stanza and see how you like it.
In the same vein, punctuation. Since there is practically none (and that's fine) the few commas should be used judiciously. In the middle of a line, good, to control the pacing. At the end of a line when there aren't even any periods, I question it since the line ending will naturally generate a pause there.
But to repeat, a successful poem on a somewhat difficult distinction (and, in the end, a love poem at that). I don't suggest turning down the sensual aspects since they're important, but they do limit your audience.
