Bums playing drums on the street

Short & sweet... always a gambit and I respect it. I think you have something good here but I have a few critiques.

First and foremost is the title - in my opinion, when you state the title within the first line, or in this case two lines of a poem, I can't help but feel like you've missed an opportunity. In a poem this short you only have so much to work with, and you should use it all to its maximum potential, including the title. Also, the fact that it takes you two lines to get the title out (and that those two lines are actually a variation on the title) came off as odd to me. Maybe this was meant to an untitled poem or something and you just needed a title for the post header. I don't know. Either way, the information that bums are playing on the street is already conveyed in the title and restating it immediately afterward seems pointless to me.

However, we do get the information that they're playing to no one. Or, as we find out - at least no one who is "listening", "caring", or... "despairing in silence and rhythm"? I like how this reads as one sentence, but I have to say that once you string the whole thing together as a sentence it loses coherence. As individual lines, the latter half of the poem could work - as in, if you had no punctuation and simply read each line as its own - and the rhyme between caring and despairing is one of those nice, unexpected rhymes that I like, becoming kind of an internal rhyme with the flow of the sentence. Still, does this mean to imply that there's no one around "despairing in silence and rhythm"? Well, okay... not sure what that looks like or if I should expect to see that.

I guess this comes down to what I feel your poem is lacking - concrete imagery. Even what is there is relatively passive. Someone "listening" is an action that someone can do while not moving at all, so it's kind of hard to picture. Same with caring and despairing. I have the image of bums playing drums on the street - I live in Austin, TX so I sure as hell have seen plenty of that! - but what if someone hadn't ever seen some bums playing drums on the street? What do they look like? How are they dressed? How are they playing the drums, what do they look like as they play? Any accompanying smells? What do the drums sound like?

Like I said - short poems are more difficult because you have less space to use to convey what you want to convey. But this one is a little too many abstract "feeling words" in a row, and I'm not sure how they form a coherent picture. The only image I got was in the first two lines, which was already stated in the title. For my advice, check out some Japanese and/or Chinese nature poems. The haiku is a well-known form for this, but check out some kanshi also. These forms are known for their economic use of language - packing imagery into relatively few lines. I think that's what this poem needs, and it would help with showing over telling.

Thanks for posting this, keep reading, keep writing!

I enjoy the rhythm and internal rhyme you use, which is also used well within the title. It evokes the subject matter; the content and the form work very well together. If I were to change anything, it would probably be the second and last lines, which I would edit to hold a more solid, sing-songy rhythm. The happy tones would, in my opinion, contrast well with the despair occurring in the poem. Still, I really like it the way it is! Keep writing more like this, it's short and sweet.