Nobody's Hero

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

The poem's central conceit — telepathy as a kind of emotional avoidance, a superpower that turns out to be a liability — is genuinely interesting and carries real psychological insight. The turn where the speaker recognizes that reading minds from a distance allowed them to never be "truly present" or make honest connection is the strongest moment in the piece, and it earns the final image of disorientation.

The main thing working against the poem right now is its lineation and pacing. The lines are fragmented into very short units in a way that feels more like hesitation than intention — phrases like "and," "in this," and "now, unfamiliar place," isolated on their own lines, slow the poem without creating meaningful emphasis or silence. It would be worth considering where the line breaks are actually doing expressive work (the pause after "My superpower is fading..." works well, for instance) versus where they are simply dividing what is essentially continuous prose. Consolidating some of the shorter fragments into longer, more purposeful lines would give the language more weight and let the emotional content breathe more naturally. The commas throughout are also doing a lot of heavy lifting in place of rhythm; reading the poem aloud and marking where stress and pause genuinely fall might help clarify which punctuation is needed and which is scaffolding that can come down.

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I love how this starts. The premise has real teeth: telepathy as avoidance, power as isolation, losing sight as finally being forced into presence. Those first two lines already do what I think the rest needs more of: “It used to be easy to read peoples’ / minds, travel roads, without sight,” has natural sentence-flow with a controlled break, and I wouldn’t change that. 

Later, though, the line breaks get too chopped up and the read-aloud rhythm starts to fall apart. For example, “I find myself / all alone / in this / now, unfamiliar place” might hit harder as “I find myself all alone in this, / now, / unfamiliar place.”

The content is there, but the form lets some of the ending go soft.

I felt a deep connection to this one. Don't worry, we are all broken in some way, but we are family here. We will help you navigate and get the best of your work from you. We have many people that just read our work, never comment and we don't know why. I suspect that they have the same feelings as the rest of us, and just simply don't want or don't possess the skill to write them down. That's okay, I call them the "Secret Readers" I suspect that you will have a lot of both public and secret readers. I agree with  patrickgadoury's assessment of the last lines.  Welcome to Neo. ~ Geezer.