$40 in happiness

[GildedWeb]

Read me my runes
show me Im doomed
waxing on like this
simply ridiculous

show me in cards
death, fool, spades, clubbed
make me a believer

a fortune in fate
commiserate
show me my sins gypsy
be my judge

love, money, ego, hate
I can hardly wait
the next card
and the next

the next stone thrown
its easier than waiting
for actual fate to take its course

Impatient to see the end
like reading from back to front
this is just another font

Tell me I’ll wed
Tell me which bed
Point the course
be my compass

I’ll buy my happiness for 20 more dollars
Flip another card

[Pendragon]

This one has great potential, it has one problem. A poem should rhyme or not rhyme. It should not do both, except in very strict form poetry, where there is an acknowledged break for the unrhymed section, (that was the last contest which I won. We are doing Villanelles for this contest which ends March 17th. Details on the Poetry Games and Contests page. Feel free to enter either contest!)

You started with rhyme, perhaps stick with it throughout?

[PrinceMyshkin]

Reluctantly, I agree with Pendragon, that if you start with rhyme you've pretty well made a contract with the reader which you break at the risk of losing his or her trust in you. I could imagine a poem in which the theme is something like the breakdown of reason or order, underlined by a shift from rhyme and measured lines to free verse. On the other hand I think one can go from free verse to rhyming couplets, say, at the end, for emphasis.

I said "reluctantly" because apart from that I like this so much. It owes nothing to any other poem I've encountered.

[AuntShecky]

At such times when yours truly has attempted to rhyme her free verse, the piece was vilified! (Never on the LitNet,though!) The problem is that rhyme and meter are supposed to go hand in hand. In other words, in end rhyme, the rhyming words both have to be stressed syllables.

Really awkward constructions arise when the meter is fractured for the sake of rhyme.
(This is a general statement, and needn't necessarily apply to the piece which opened this thread.)

Just an aside, because this is a fallacy that appears now and again: "blank verse" is NOT the same as "free verse."
Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter (a la Shakespeare.)