Grief

The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:

The poem's strongest moment is its opening: waking in the dark and experiencing that brief amnesia of grief — the split-second before loss reasserts itself — is handled with real economy and emotional precision. "I forgot, that safe, in my bed... you were not" enacts the disorientation rather than just describing it, and that delayed "you were not" lands with quiet force.

The poem runs into difficulty in its middle section, where the accumulation of end-rhymes — spare, despair, tight, air, bare, rare, cared, tear, there — begins to feel mechanical rather than inevitable. When rhyme arrives this frequently and predictably, it can pull the reader's attention toward the sound pattern and away from the grief itself, which is the opposite of what this material needs. The fragmented lineation (breaking "so real, / so warm, / so bare" across separate lines) seems intended to slow the reader down and intensify feeling, but paired with the insistent rhyme scheme it instead creates a slightly sing-song rhythm that works against the rawness of the subject. One possible direction: loosening the rhyme scheme so that only the most earned sound echoes survive — perhaps "bare" and "tear" — would let the imagery of the pillow, the scent, the physical memory carry more weight on its own terms.

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The opening really worked for me. That moment of waking up and forgetting, just for a second, that the person isn’t safe in bed beside you anymore, that’s the real grief in the poem for me.

Only thing I’d look at is the rhyme near the middle/end.