Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-27728724-20160401164941/@comment-24101790-20160401171110

I'm sorry but there are quite a few issues here. The coding errors shrunk down the text so I removed them and used the ,poem>Poem in its place. Starting with the rhyme scheme. The A-A- rhyme scheme really stumbles in places and takes out any lyrical quality/flow in the poem. Try reading the poem aloud to yourself to see these issues.

Punctuation issues: Commas missing from line breaks. Lines like "Shadows, shadows, all around me Are you real or in my mind?", "Shadows, shadows, are you there You lurking friends of mine?", "Shadows with me when I wake Oh so vaguely defined.", etc. as they are end-stopped lines. Treat it like a story, if there's a natural pause, then there should like be a comma/semicolon at the end of the line

While the repetition of "lurking friends of mine" can work for larger stanzas, in a set of five quatrains it kind of feels redundant with only a few lines separating the repetition.

As for the story/plot of the poem, I really think there needs to be a bit more content to flesh out the concept. The protagonist is seeing shadows and doubting their existence (multiple times: "Are you real or in my mind?" / "Are you there or are you fake,"). Really giving their impact on the protagonist would really strengthen the story here. As it stands, I think this needs quite a bit of revision before it's up to quality standards.