The Eye of A Peephole

[_Paul]

Through the eye of a peephole
My life ebbs away
I smile at my neighbour twice
She returns it once
For tomorrow is there today

We glance from across the room
Our words in the air
They hang but never meet
Bonds of silence, and
Shyness rule this torrid affair

People’s past shapes the future
So I’m always told
Pasts entwine to future coils
Coils entwine again
Lost in time we never unfold

Three roads meet in just one place
Two from sun, one rain
Yet all roads can meet true but
Travel the roads wise
For roads beyond don’t meet again

Words of wisdom echo now
And that’s all we have
Echoes of love, loss and lust
Kept always in mind
For only there can truth be had

[Hawkman]

OK, the first two stanzas of this poem are really good and seem to be going somewhere. Unfortunately From the first line of S3 it starts to stumble.

"People's pasts shape the future" would be grammatically and syntactically correct. the last three lines of this stanza really start to get out of hand. Too much repetition and the scansion goes to pot. S4 just doesn't make sense, largely, I think, because you are not conjugating verbs.

You recover a bit in S5, which is more coherent than the two preceeding verses. On the whole I think you need to get a grip on what it is you are actually trying to say here. Write it out in prose, obeying the rules of grammar and syntax, and then work it into a coherent poem.

[smerdyakov]

Hi Paul. I would tend to agree with Hawk, you lost your way after stanza 2.
There are some nice lines in the first two stanzas:
"We glance from across the room
Our words in the air
They hang but never meet
Bonds of silence,..."

The rest of the poem descends into cliched aphorisms:"travel the roads wise" etc, and leaves no impression on the reader unfortunately.

All the best.