love?

Zarathustras-Crown from #project-improve here, apologies on the lateness of the response we're just getting set up in the new group format <img src="e.deviantart.net/emoticons/s/s…" width="15" height="15" alt="" title=" (Smile)" />

I can tell from reading the piece that the emotional investment into it is great, and in a lot of ways that psychological "oomph" tends to really make or break a piece. From a purely structural standpoint there is a few suggestions I think I can offer, keep in mind poetry is pretty subjective, what one person likes another doesn't so for most of this think of it more as just "another way to look at it" than anything hard and fast that has to be done to make a good poem.

The first thing is the length, long poems are fine. Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" is considered a classic and it's long to the extreme. However, when the length gets to a point it's generally a good idea to add breaks throughout. This not only can help in bringing a greater sense of flow and organization to the piece, but it can also be simply aesthetically more "grabbing" to the eye. Allowing a reader to get a handle on the atmosphere, mood, and overall feel of the poem by taking a small bite so to speak. In other words it can be easier at times to take in when broken into these stanzas

The line, "so many times I've wished you were hear" would be "here" I'm pretty certain, it seems likely you just carried it over from the line before. And lastly, there's points I'm uncertain of how I should be reading the poem. In this sort of writing there's often a lot of subjectivity, allegory, alliteration and other odd linguistic quirks. So in a lot of ways when we read a poem, we rely on the artist to give us hints as to where emphasis should be placed and such. Take Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" for example,

"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
''Tis some visitor,' I muttered, 'tapping at my chamber door —
Only this, and nothing more.'"

Poe gives us a rhythm we're almost forced into using, a sort of beat "DUN-dun-DUN-dun-DUN-dun-DUN". While it's not necessary for poems of a free form nature like the one you wrote to have quite that rigid a structure, the writer still needs to offer a sense of how the words should be taken by the reader. This begins with an "ABA" sort of style with head and unread rhyming, there's a small section which seems to begin a series of references to the subject of the poem (that section beginning with "you"). Most of the rest is free form with the exception of the conclusion. The rhythm or feel changes all through the piece, so at points ends up feeling a little chaotic, though I think what I mentioned before about the spacing may have contributed to that clustered feeling. If that section beginning with "you" had been a stanza of it's own the break beforehand would allow the reader to separate the difference between that and the rest of the work. As it is, I find myself falling into a rhythm and immediately being jarred out of it during the free form parts.

This is an honest, and heartfelt piece I can feel that right from the start. In terms of what I feel like you were going for you were largely successful, you conveyed the feeling of love lost and the sense of betrayal or having been lied to in a clear and relatable manner. To me, it felt as though it was a little cluttered however and may have benefited some from a bit of reorganizing. Like I said before, these are just ideas and one person's perspective.

Thanks for submitting your work <img src="e.deviantart.net/emoticons/s/s…" width="15" height="15" alt="" title=" (Smile)" /> I do hope to see more from you.