Cloud

[Jinian]

My partner has a cloud that goes in and out with him,
And what can be the use of it is more than he can limn.
It's there in the morning and there at sleeping time.
And follows him to town while the house is in sunshine.

The cars pull out when I arrive for easy parking places,
He wonders if they're mystified at giving up their spaces,
Statistically speaking one can't be too assured, but he
Thinks I'm very lucky so he's sticking close to me.

He stops to go to shops and it unzips down a shower
To let him know devotion and also who's got power.
As he turns for home it packs its bags, scudding after him.
To greet with open arms and another drenching whim.

That's not to say he's paranoid or prone to being glum,
He's my perfect match with an equilibrium,
That's why he lives with me, I'm an optimistic soul
I gnomen count the sunny hours - I find him rather droll.

[MorpheusSandman]

I love the whimsy of the content, but I think you could smooth out the meter a bit. It's basically in ballad form, which usually works better as four lines instead of two, like:

My partner has a cloud that goes
in and out with him,
And what can be the use of it
is more than he can limn.

[Jinian]

Um, are these breaks meant to tell one when to take a breath or some other reason? But then it'd occupy twice the space - and I'm all for tidiness...

[deryk]

I agree with MorpheusSandman, it isn't bad poetry, but the rhyme-scheme gutters it up much more than it deserves. Redirecting the meter will improve it immensely.

[MorpheusSandman]

Um, are these breaks meant to tell one when to take a breath or some other reason? It's just how ballad meter is written. It's a bit easier read in two lines of 4 and 3 feet rather than one of 7.

[Jinian]

I see... should I have called it The Ballad of the Cloud? Or perhaps it's not a ballad but something vague and amorphous, maybe best considered as prose?

[MorpheusSandman]

Most poems written in ballad meter don't have "ballad" in the title. Emily Dickinson used it a lot. I think it works just fine as poetry. I was just suggesting a restructuring. It's not a fatal flaw, really. I just didn't see a reason for diverting from the norm. There are poems called fourteeners that is essentially ballad meter written in one line like you wrote it, but they're just less common ever since shorter lines became more popular.

[Jinian]

lol I was just having fun with you, and it's kind of you to spend the time to give me pointers. By the time my stuff is exposed to the world I've finished with it, though I realise I have no schooling in the subject at all. My weakest link is apostrophe(')s, that definitely doesn't come naturally no matter how often I'm quoted a rule for applying. Hey ho, such is life.