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The way of man
Cold and desperate hungry and alone.The heat is off and no one's home.There's no food in the cupboard , no socks or shoes for my feet , but there's guns and drugs and homeless sexual deviant predators , trolling my street.
Only 8 years old when I learned, sometimes even the good guys are bad. And if you get caught talking to the wrong crooked cop, you'll end up a corpse stuffed in a bag.
Dumped in the Mississippi or left in the alley. Another casualty of society, a nameless faceless, nobody just another Cold Case to be forgotten.
Fatherless, children and prostitute Mother's, no heroes are coming to save. There's a way that seems right unto a man, but in the end, his footsteps lead him to his grave.
About This Poem
Last Few Words: This poem, it's the truth.
Review Request Direction:
What did you think of my title?
How was my language use?
What did you think of the rhythm or pattern or pacing?
How was the beginning/ending of the poem?
Review Request Intensity: I appreciate moderate constructive criticism
Editing Stage: Not actively editing
Critiques
neopoet
3 days 2 hours ago
Neopoet AI (premium) [2026-06]
The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:
The poem's strongest moments come from its concrete inventory of deprivation. The opening lines—"no food in the cupboard, no socks or shoes for my feet"—ground the speaker's world in physical specifics that carry more weight than any abstract statement of suffering could. That accumulation of small absences does real work, and the detail of socks and shoes in particular makes the cold of the poem felt rather than merely named.
The decision to lower the speaker's age to eight in the second stanza is effective. Placing a hard-earned cynicism—"sometimes even the good guys are bad"—in the mouth of a child sharpens the loss, because the line measures innocence against what has displaced it. The image of the corpse "stuffed in a bag" and then "dumped in the Mississippi" gives the threat a named geography, which keeps the danger from feeling generic.
The closing turn toward the proverb ("There's a way that seems right unto a man...") signals an ambition to lift the particular into the universal. That move is worth keeping, but at present the borrowed scriptural cadence sits at some distance from the raw, street-level voice that precedes it, and the shift can feel like the poem reaching for an ending rather than arriving at one. One option would be to let the final image grow out of the poem's own vocabulary—the cupboard, the alley, the cold case—so the closing wisdom feels earned by what came before rather than imported.
A few places would gain force from tighter control. The phrase "homeless sexual deviant predators" stacks four modifiers where one precise image might cut deeper; piling on adjectives tends to diffuse menace rather than concentrate it. Consider whether a single observed detail could make the threat more vivid than the catalogue of labels does. Similarly, "nameless faceless, nobody" and "forgotten" cover overlapping ground, and the anonymity theme might land harder if one phrasing carried it alone.
Attention to the mechanics would also help the poem present itself well: spacing around punctuation is inconsistent, and "prostitute Mother's" appears to want a plural rather than a possessive. These are small fixes, but on a page this spare they draw the eye away from the language doing the heavier lifting.
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Trouble
1 day 22 hours ago
The way
Hey frank I sincerely hope this poem isn't factual what a journey too live for a child
A Good hard hitting piece of writing
Trouble
1 day 22 hours ago
The way
Hey frank I sincerely hope this poem isn't factual what a journey too live for a child
A Good hard hitting piece of writing
Frank Johnson
1 day 19 hours ago
Reality?
To be a hundred percent factual , It is my story and the story of many of my piers.
Frank Johnson
1 day 19 hours ago
Reality?
To be a hundred percent factual , It is my story and the story of many of my piers.
Frank Johnson
1 day 19 hours ago
Thank you for reading .
I'm a spoken word artist if you go to my Facebook.A lot of these poems are in my reels.With audio and visual layers. I use my natural voice. To music to best, tell the story check it out some time.@ Frank Johnson. spoken word
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