I miss you.

[organizedchaos]

Missing someone is a very particular, specific feeling. In the poem below, I have tried to capture such specific moments. Please give me feedback if something is unclear or doesn't flow well.

....

During the nighttime is when I miss you the most. When the drone of the daylight rush has faded and a hush comes over the air particles that rain down from the sky. When the dark streets make me feel vulnerable, and your protective absence is worn in my tense arm muscles. When I turn over on my side, and expect your hand to gently roll over my waste and drape over my skin, shielding me from the worries of the past day.

I take that back - I also miss you when the sun is bright, and when the golden light reflects off the leaves and bounce towards the deep layers of the rods and cones in my eyes, affecting my vision in a similar way that you did.

But I can only miss you to a certain extent, because to a certain extent I didn’t know you. And such absence makes me miss you more. Because I want to know you.

I also miss you when it rains, and memories come flooding back of pretending we are in Italy, and getting soaked while kissing the rain drops off each other faces.

I miss you when I sit down by the lake, watching the sailboats find freedom in space, something that all the couples surrounding me don’t agree with, as they snuggle closely to one another, feed off a lack of space.

I miss you when I spend all morning getting read – curl my hair and paint my nails – and for no one but myself and my need to look through passing windows and feel okay about my reflection. Not that you really care about the small details of my appearance, but its better to have you staring back at me instead of my reflection.

I miss you when I want to dance, and when I see you across the room wanting to do the same. And I can’t go grab your arm and pull you on the dance floor. Even though you are in the same room as me, I miss you then.

I miss you in the simple moments – when I crave Thai food. When I drive by your house. When I see a mural and wonder if you helped paint it.

I miss you. I do. But as the sun shines brightly on my skin, it adds layers and layers of Divine strength to who I am without you, and eases the pain of missing with an assurance that I will fill the space on my own.

[hillwalker]

This is good in parts, but because you are constrained by the style of writing (prose poem rather than poem poem) every line ends up being a self-contained sentence, and so the piece comes across as a list of statements; especially as you repeat 'I miss you' at the beginning of most lines towards the end.

I also felt the 3rd line was far too analytical - completely out of place when seen in the context of the rest of the poem (as well as repeating 'to a certain extent' which is a little clumsy).

As for the flow of the piece - there is no sense of progression which the reader sometimes needs from a poem to appreciate the conclusion once it has been reached. Every sentence in this poem has the same value - so it hardly matters which order you read them in.

I do believe this could be trimmed to a much better piece - and as a framework it's a good start - but it's not complete.

I'm assuming 'waste' in line one should be 'waist'

H

[PrinceMyshkin]

I could engage with most of these assertions, familiar though they were, until I came to the last of them where "Divine strength" - a deus ex machina - was dragged in willy-nilly. That is, there was no evidence of its existence prior to that last statement; and it seemed to negate all that had come before it.