untitled for now

To be honest, I don't know if you were going for rhyming or not. I originally misread the first line as "An upside to the ocean is that all waves disappear", which has a good rhythm to it. "Above" and "drudge" sort of rhyme, and "starts"/"far"/"heart" appear to be intentionally chosen for their sound. The phrasing of the fourth and fifth lines is also kind of awkward, which is something that you'll often see when someone's trying to conform to a meter... but other than that, the poem doesn't exactly have a regular structure?

I think it'd work well as a rhyming poem. Free-form is also fine, though. However, I'd suggest that you settle with one.

"Stop me when it starts" is a really powerful line, and I found its placement towards the end suitable. It gave me the impression of exhaustion and hopelessness, which seems to be just what you were going for. "don't let life break my heart" is pretty generic, and the emphasis on "let life break" is clunky. If rhyming is important to you, you can say something like "you whisper to your heart"- which is depressing if you interpret it literally, but I suppose that's the fun of it. Otherwise, I'd encourage you to come up with something maybe more raw or personal to your fear.

Then, a few smaller notes:

I don't think the dialogue in your second line is formatted correctly. It should look more like

You tend to ask yourself, "Who controls the tides?"

In the third line, "gambling" and "luck" don't vibe together, I feel like you may have combined two phrases? Try "a gambling mother" or "a mother who tests her luck".

I found the fourth line to be a little too obvious- try to develop your theme throughout the poem instead of directly stating it.

I didn't like how you used "tides" again in your fifth line. Luckily, that's not difficult to change, you can either refer to the tides more vaguely (since you were just talking about them in the previous lines, I don't think you have to go out of your way to reintroduce them as a topic) or change the phrasing altogether.

I wish I could help you out more with the titles! I used to be good at those, but I'm in a real title block myself at the moment. I've sort of been getting away with taking fragments from lines I like or think are important (to be honest, they're sometimes just the openers)- for your poem, that'd be "An upside to the ocean", which sounds legit enough. Still, I think the real beauty of titles is when they can suggest a theme that doesn't seem to be relevant at first, but is deeply connected to the poem! In that case, maybe something like "9 to 5" would work nicely. Always good to repurpose scrap lines :)

Nice job here!

Hi, thanks for the poem. Here are my thoughts:

• I like how the first few lines flow. It feels smooth, like the shifting of the tides.
• I also like the repetition of "Stop me when it starts," which also made me think of the ocean.
• "modern drudge" felt a bit weird... not as lyrical as the lines above and there was a sudden rhyme
• I was a confused by the sudden shift in perspective from "you" to "me/my" in the second half of the poem.
• It was hard for me to understand what you need to be stopped from. My interpretation is something like this: "You are thinking about what is coming in the future. Who is responsible of it? Is it all luck? etc." But then you think that getting lost too far in such thoughts is dangerous, so you are asking someone to stop you from thinking these thoughts.
• I prefer the version without 9 to 5. I also think that finishing with "break my heart" may be a bit cliche.

Overall, I like the first half more than the second half! Thanks for the poem :)

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